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"The CIA's research program is described in a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate."
Standard
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"Find as much information about your subject as you can."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A successful radiation researcher must research both radiation and the harmful biological effects of the radiation exposures received by the researcher."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I was only interested in my scene, and I had to go through thousands and thousands of other scenes. I got my scene and I read it many, many, many, many, many times. That was my research."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The biologically harmful effects of man-made environmental radiation was a jigsaw of existing information that needed to be assembled by a group of independent researchers that had a broad range of knowledge and were free of corrupt corporate government influence."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Basic research is very useful, but it should be more geared toward application than it was before."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I am in favor of stem-cell research. I am not in favor of creating new human embryos through cloning."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative."
Woman
"An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit."
Woman
"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
"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
"We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary."
Now
"When I'm writing a woman character, I don't think, 'What would a woman do?' I just think, 'What would this character do in this situation?'"
Character
"Most of my stories have some basis in fact."
Fact
"With hindsight, we see that the Soviet Union never had a chance of world domination, but we didn't know that then."
Chance
"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
"I use a professional researcher in New York who does all the legwork, all that stuff which would take me days and weeks of calling, waiting for people to call back."
People
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