Quotes from Louis de Bernieres

When you have children it completely shifts your focus; they become the most passionate love of your life...

We have roots that grow towards each other underground. And when all the pretty blossom has fallen from our branches we find that we are one tree and not two.

The De Bernieres were very military. I broke the military tradition but I was terribly proud of my father being a soldier.

The moral of the story was that if you can talk, it's better not to tell the truth.

Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms.

What keeps me going is my children.

Like many men, I am not ashamed to admit that my principal joys are domestic. I love cooking, and I love looking after my children. Indeed, the times that I have with them are the only ones when I feel unconditionally happy.

An adversarial family law system raises the stakes unnecessarily high, exacerbates the antagonism of the couples concerned, and is directly responsible for making it impossible for couples who would otherwise have reconciled to do so.

Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow.

Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.

Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?

We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.

Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other's presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid.

History is the propaganda of the victors.

I know you have not thought about it. Italians always act without thinking, it's the glory and the downfall of your civilisation. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish...well, God knows. Anyway, Pelagia is Greek, that's my point.

Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow.

Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.

She] knew that it was not precisely a body that one loved. One loved the man who shone out through the eyes and used its mouth to smile and speak.

Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That's why fear should be unknown to us.

Your lips are like sugar And your cheeks an apple Your breasts are paradise And your body a lily. O, to kiss the sugar To bite the apple To reveal paradise And open the lily.

Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you've got is the dough.

The garden where you sit Has never a need of flowers, For you are the blossoms And only a fool or the blind Would fail to know it

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.