You Need The Art In

As Soon As You Start Doing That - Changing Things - It Seems Self-evident To Me That You've Entered The World Of Make-believe. If You Pretend That It's True, And Use Your Own Name, You Are Misleading People. Fiction Is Looser And Wilder And Sometimes In The End More Self-revealing, Anyway.

History Isn't A Seesaw. If You Have A Really Bad Regime On One Side, The Actions On The Other Side Don't Automatically Become Good. It Doesn't Work That Way.

A Problem That I Have With Everything Fictional Is That Writers Are Always Having To Come Up With Sudden Artillery Explosions In The Middle Of Whatever Is Going On. The Characters Are Having Interesting, Subtle Interactions, Or Jealousies, Or Whatever It Is, And Suddenly Some Gigantic Angry Eruption Has To Happen, A Giant Gasp Where Everyone Has To Scramble Around. That's The Point Where I'm Turned Off. I Want The Dynamic Range To Be A Little Smaller. I Don't Like The Big False Bangs.

I Wrote About World War Ii Because I Didn't Understand It. I Think That's The Reason That Historians Are Drawn To Any Subject - There's Something About It That Doesn't Make Sense. I Wanted To Work My Way Through What Happened Slowly, And Look At Everything In The Order In Which It Took Place.

Just As The People Who Lived Through The Second World War Thought Different Things On Different Days, I Think Everybody Who Goes Through That Period Carefully Now Thinks Different Things On Different Days.