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The Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

Every great movie is about the people, even if it's a great popular success like 'Gone With the Wind.' It's really not about the Civil War. It's about Scarlett and Rhett. That's who you go to see. You're not going to root for the North or pull for the South, or, you know, it's the people you remember.

Sometimes we see the Civil War in movies and imagine these neatly aligned rows of men with muskets, walking in line to shoot each other. In reality the things that fascinated me were how absolutely ruthless and violent so many engagements were, how much suffering and how men were not prepared.

When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.

Speaking as a writer, it would be difficult to find an event in American history more dramatic and riveting than the Civil War.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

I'm attracted to polarizing characters who upend the civility of life.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

I think in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne. Very interesting character because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different.