And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

On Lee as commander: "He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor.

I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.

It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

The destiny of the land, the nation, the South, the State, the County, was already whirling into the plunge of its precipice, not that the State and the South knew it, because the first seconds of fall always seem like soar.