Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.
“The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.”