Bernard Cornwell

“I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow.”

“But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you'll just weep yourself to death.”

“It will never end.Till the world ends in the chaos of Ragnarok, we will fight for our women, for our land, and for our homes. Some Christians speak of peace, of the evil of war, and who does not want peace? But then some crazed warrior comes screaming his god's filthy name into your face and his only ambitions are to kill you, to rape your wife, to enslave your daughters, and take your home, and so you must fight.”

“You'll call me a damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of christian children.” This was all said cheerfully. “How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things. The only mercy of children is that they grow up, as my son has but then, tragically, they beget more children. We do not learn life's lessons.”

“Lord Derfel, you do insult a man so very easily. What was it to be? My head in a pit dunged by slaves? What a paltry imagination you do have. Mine, I fear, sometimes seems excessive, even to me.”

“I'm fortunate that the books sell, but even more fortunate to live in Chatham, to be very happily married and to have, on the whole, a fairly clear conscience.”

“At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.”

“I decided to start a war, father", I said, cheerfully, "it's so much more interesting than peace.”

“This isn't just a war over land, it's a war about God. And Alfred...is Christ's servant...”

“A sad, plangent music. In the British camp, Sharpe thought, they would be singing, but no one was singing here.”

“It's better to make the wrong choice," my father had continued, "than to make no choice at all.”

“He sounded pathetic and he knew it, but he had been driven to this humiliation by love. A woman can do that. They have power. We might all say that the oath to our lord is the strong oath that guides our lives, the oath that binds us and rules all the other oaths, but few men would not abandon every oath under the sun for a woman. I have broken oaths. I am not proud of that, but almost every oath I broke was for a woman.”

“Television is a young person's medium.”

“Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not choose them. So if fate is real, do we have a choice?”

“Nor did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. ‘What is the egg to the eagle?’ he asked me…”

“What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness.”

“It's fun. I sit down every day and tell stories. Some folk would kill to get that chance.”

“Together we would make reputation, we would have men in halls across Britain telling the story of our exploit. Or of our deaths. They were friends, they were oath-men, they were young, they were warriors, and with such men it might be possible to storm the gates of Asgard itself.”

“Anyone who claims to have an entirely clear conscience is almost certainly a bore.”

“One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive.”