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"The CIA's research program is described in a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate."
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"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."
"Times have changed in research and if you are not using Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia, Google, and the like, you will be left in the dark."
"Find as much information about your subject as you can."
"Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities."
"I am in favor of stem-cell research. I am not in favor of creating new human embryos through cloning."
"Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Ken Follett
"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."
"With hindsight, we see that the Soviet Union never had a chance of world domination, but we didn't know that then."
"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."
"My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era."
"An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"In my books, women often solve the problem. Even if the woman is not the hero, she's a strong character. She does change the plot. She'll often rescue the male character from some situation."
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