Any stupid remark, quoted often enough, becomes gospel.
Regretfully, I have decided that if the Saint Saga must remain permanently in print in its entirety, then it can only do so in its original form.
Simon Templar was a man who couldn’t help spreading melodrama all around him like an infectious disease.
For there is a price ticket on everything that puts a whizz into life, and adventure follows the rule. It’s distressing, but there you are.
If I didn’t see its place in the Saga when I planned it, I probably wouldn’t write it at all.
Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.
In 1938, when I had decided that the only way to see the country was in a trailer, and I built the trailer which I still have and lived in it for eighteen months, and learned America from San Diego to the Canadian border, from Miami to New Jersey, and east to west in between.
I had still never read one of the Bond books when the movie Dr. No came out.
The gleam in their eyes telegraphs only too clearly that they are hoping for a headline, which of course means something disparaging, because nothing makes such good copy as a feud.
He believes in romance. He isn’t merely going through the mechanical movements of a man in an exciting situation. He is, vitally and positively squeezing the last drop of delight from living the best life he knows in the best way he can.
It should cause no surprise that anyone so lazy as myself should be economical to the point of miserliness with everything he writes.
Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.