Quotes from Louis de Bernieres

Don't give into him at all. Deny yourself. Because then your eyes will not be clouded by a madness that you cannot control, and then you will be able to learn to see him as he is. Do you understand?

In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.

No man is a man until he has been a soldier.

Love itself is what is left over when being "in love" has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

It's simple. Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

I do not want you to believe any of this because it is all crap, but it is the crap in which the piles of our pseudo-European culture are embedded, so you had better understand it because no one who does not understand the history and taxonomy of crap will ever come to know the difference between crap and pseudocrap and noncrap.

So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.

It seems that everyone has their own inexplicable fear to have nightmares about. We need nightmares to keep ourselves entertained, and fend off the contentment that we all fear and abhor so much.

Family law is institutionally anti-male. I've been lobbying MPs, and I'm not going to give up campaigning for equality until I get equality.

Love is not breathlessness; It is not excitement; It is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love", which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

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

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

It seems that everyone has their own inexplicable fear to have nightmares about. We need nightmares to keep ourselves entertained, and fend off the contentment that we all fear and abhor so much.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were not one tree and not two.