God Is In His Heaven And The

In The Hands Of Politicians Grand Designs Achieve Nothing But New Forms Of The Old Misery.

I Think That Most Of My Books Are Part Of Some Process Of Self-education, Often About The Places I Go To. Most Of All, They Are About The Peculiar Tension Between Institutional Loyalty And Loyalty To Oneself; The Mystery Of Patriotism, For A Brit Of My Age And Generation, Where It Runs, How It Should Be Defined, What It's Worth And What A Corrupting Force It Can Be When Misapplied. All That Stuff Is Just In Me And It Comes Out In The Characters. I Don't Mean To Preach, But I Know I Do, And I'm A Very Flawed Person. It's Quite Ridiculous.

The Greatest Threat To Mankind Comes From The Renunciation Of Individual Scruple In Favor Of Institutional Denominators. . . . Real Heroism Lies, As It Always Will, Not In Conformity Or Even Patriotism, But In Acts Of Solitary Moral Courage. Which, Come To Think Of It, Is What We Used To Admire In Our Christian Savior

In Every War Zone That I've Been In, There Has Been A Reality And Then There Has Been The Public Perception Of Why The War Was Being Fought. In Every Crisis, The Issues Have Been Far More Complex Than The Public Has Been Allowed To Know.

Novelists Are Not Equipped To Make A Movie, In My Opinion. They Make Their Own Movie When They Write: They're Casting, They're Dressing The Scene, They're Working Out Where The Energy Of The Scene Is Coming From And They're Also Relying Tremendously On The Creative Imagination Of The Reader.