Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.
We cannot fail to win unless we fail to try.
The Only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.
People live longer today than they ever have. They live happier lives, have more knowledge, more information. All this is the result of communications technology. How is any of that bad?
Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.
I wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you’re immortal.
If you want to kick the tiger in his ass you’d better have a plan for dealing with his teeth.
I’d rather talk to people who do things than complain about other people who do things. I say they’re idiots.
I haven’t got any fan mail from Osama bin Laden. I have no reason to believe he reads my stuff I’ll never decide for commercial reasons to put something in that endangers our national security. You just can’t do that.
There is an old saying: In history nothing is true but the names and dates. In fiction everything is true but the names and dates. The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.
The smaller the mind, the greater the ego.
Ice hockey is the closest thing to religion permitted by the Soviet Union.
I don’t discuss works in progress...
That’s the ultimate pornography There’s nothing more pornographic than glorifying war.
Keep at it! The one talent that’s indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Do not try to commit art. Just tell the damned story.
The first rumors about Zenith came from the Czechoslovakians.
Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians.
Anti-Catholicism is the last respectable prejudice. You can’t hate black people anymore, of course, and you can’t hate homosexuals anymore, but you can hate all the Catholics you want.
All field agents have some cowboy in them – even the ones from New York.
Privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded to a skipper.