Tom Clancy Art Quotations

My vision for this book and the others in the series is to let people know what kind of commanders we have, ... You don't pick generals off park benches. ... They are experts at what they do and lot of thinking goes into it. And I want to get across to people the intellectual dimension of command, to let people know that it's hard to be a general. And the people we have with general stars on their shoulders are pretty smart and pretty good guys.

I think about the characters I've created, and then I sit down and start typing and see what they will do. There's a lot of subconscious thought that goes on. It amazes me to find out, a few chapters later, why I put someone in a certain place when I did.

Keep at it! The one talent that's indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Do not try to commit art. Just tell the damned story.

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.

Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up! his mind demanded of him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation. Different segments of the organism called John Terrance Kelly knew different parts of the whole story, but somehow they'd never all come together, leaving the separate fragments of what had ...once been a tough, smart, decisive and to blunder about in confusion - and despair! There was a happy thought.

People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots...

Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.

What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else.