I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itine… - John Fowles

If you are wise, you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationships between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.

Since the advent of atomic weapons it is clear that what matters militarily is not numbers but know-how; this situation was apparent as soon as the first machine gun was invented.