Top 7 Quotes & Sayings by Allan Massie

Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.

We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible.

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilized folk to despise war.

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.

Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.

It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read.