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.
Speak your dialogue out loud. If it sounds like the way people talk, then write it down.
The KGB still killed people, the KGB would not execute its last prisoner until the final days of its existence in 1991, but by the eighties a termination required paperwork and signatures and a post-action review.
There is a long and honorable tradition of citizens in service to their nation that goes back at least as far as Cincinnatus, the Roman citizen who, more than once answered his country’s call, then returned to his farm and his family and his work.
Fighting wars is not so much about killing people as it is about finding things out. The more you know, the more likely you are to win a battle.
There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.
Wars are begun by frightened men. They fear war, but more than that, they fear what will happen if they don’t start one or take equivalent action, I suppose.
People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots...
Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.
She didn’t strike me as a “crossword in ink” kind of girl.
I understand why we do that now. It’s a help, not a threat. It’s something to remind you how important words are. Ideas are important. Principles are important. Words are important. Your word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are.
Most things in here don’t react well to bullets.
Probably what pushed the Russians over the edge was SDI. They realized they couldn’t beat us.
Once you stop believing in Santa Claus, the whole world just goes downhill.
In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.