I ran into Ku Klux Klan and the threat of hurricanes, and those two things made me decide not to build on the Alabama coast, so we came back to Memphis.

I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.

Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.

My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.

I ran into Ku Klux Klan and the threat of hurricanes, and those two things made me decide not to build on the Alabama coast, so we came back to Memphis.

I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

I never cared what kind of grade I got.

Longevity conquers scandal every time.

But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience.

Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.

I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

And I really do think that the difficulty of research makes it more real to you than punching a thing to find out how many men were killed at this particular action.

I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

Shiloh is a wonderfully dramatic battle. The leader of one side is killed, and the other one is going on to glory, and it was the first great battle. It lasted two days.

I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.

Well fight them sir til hell freezes over and then sir we will fight them on the ice.

The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being and it was a hell of a crossroads.

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. The library is the university.

There are many singers who have got an exceptional talent, but spend their lives singing in local trains or hotels. Does the country even know who they are? Music in India is restricted only to Bollywood. Whoever manages to make a mark there is remembered. The ones who fail to reach and make it big there are forgotten.

The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies.

The German debt to the Jewish people can never end, not in this generation and not in any other.

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.

Fate gives you the finger and you accept.

Time will take your money, but money won't buy time.

Once DNA acquires the ability to persist forever the carriers become disposable. Essentially our bodies are designed to last long enough to reproduce.

My job is to bring the tickle. I know what's funny.

Past middle age, some friends suggested that I should have my eyebags removed, the deepening creases on my face stretched. I often examined my face in the mirror, imagining how I'd look if I followed the suggestion. I decided to retain the old mug. I was too familiar and comfortable with it. And the final hindrance: the cost.

Well I could have been just a writer. I had been a hair dresser. I could have stuck with that.

I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.

One thing I really want to do is - I spent ten years in New York doing theater before I moved to L.A. to do TV and film. I'd really like to go to back New York and do some theater.

Tears fall in my heart like the rain on the town.

In France, they call the beauty of youth 'the evil beauty.' You don't have it because of you but because you're born with it. The other kind of beauty is your own work, and it takes forever.

Stay hungry stay young stay foolish stay curious and above all stay humble because just when you think you got all the answers is the moment when some bitter twist of fate in the universe will remind you that you very much dont.

The great advantage to labor arising out of co-operative effort has been apparent to me for many years.

I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity .

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

Personally, one of the down sides of founding a company is that there is always too much work to do, and sadly I find I don't have much time to code any more.

Jealously is always born with love but it does not die with it.

As a kid growing up, I was never like, 'I want to go to the Olympics,' so having to pass on 2012 because I was too young didn't bother me at all.

I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.