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Quotes by Writer

"Values are principles and ideas that bring meaning to the seemingly mundane experience of life. A meaningful life that ultimately brings happiness and pride requires you to respond to temptations as well as challenges with honor, dignity, and courage."

"Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition."


"When you understand what you see, you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman and child on earth, you will be wiser."


"Once you put yourself in the hands of the government, you could end up in Utah."


"Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions."

"I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again."

"My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author."

"How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!"

"The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture."

"The reason there's so much ignorance is that those who have it are so eager to share it."

"Never congratulate a doctor for the fast recovery of a patient."

"One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy."

"Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin."

"The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic."

"The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life."


"I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can."

"I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space."


"No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."

"I admit that the eyes of the intellectually and culturally lively tend to glaze over at the mere mention of sociology, often with ample justification."

"Whatever the price, identify it now. What will you have to go through to get where you want to be? There is a price you can pay to be free of the situation once and for all. It may be a fantastic price or a tiny one - but there is a price."

"What's a Dullahan?''He's a headless horseman, in the service of the banshee.''Headless?''Yes.''Seriously?''Yes.''So he has no head?''That's usually what headless means.''No head at all?''You're really getting hung up on this headless thing, aren't you?''It's just kind of silly, even for us.''Yet you spend your days with a living skeleton.''But at least he has a head.''True.''He even has a spare."


"America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember."

"Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories."

"And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet."

"I love you.''Yeah, well...''You make my heart want to beat.''That's nice and creepy. But I'm with Fletcher.(...) Also, these proclamations of your undying love for me are getting kind of... it's a bit much to be honest. Just hold back a little.''But my love for you is eternal.''That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about."

"I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things."

"Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own."

"I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland."

"I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world."

"The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?"

"To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of."
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