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"I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have."
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"There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Big shows are more like events and small shows are more like traditional gigs."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I believe, however, that impending events will call us and we must respond but where, with whom, and how?"
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Personal Development
"Events are called inevitable only after they have occurred."
Author Name
Personal Development
"News events are like Texas weather. If you don't like it, wait a minute."
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Personal Development
"Rossi was the first to describe another system working with valves in parallel; it has the advantage that it can easily be extended to coincidences between more than two events, and is therefore predominantly used today."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it's fresh."
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Personal Development
"Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject."
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"The CIA's research program is described in a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate."
Research
"Culture clash is terrific drama."
Cultural
"The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying."
Writing
"For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words."
Success
"The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century."
Writing
"With hindsight, we see that the Soviet Union never had a chance of world domination, but we didn't know that then."
Chance
"I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult."
Woman
"It was the most romantic plane ever made."
Aviation
"World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years."
Love
"There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era."
War
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