Hard work should be rewarded by good food.

Everything in Tom’s cathedral looked as if it was meant to be. Perhaps her life was like that, everything foreordained in a grand design, and she was like a foolish builder who wanted a waterfall...

An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.

Fear could paralyse. Action was the antidote.

politicians often had the knack of seeming to know everyone intimately. Either they had remarkable memories, or their secretaries reminded them efficiently.

Monks committed all the same sins that ordinary people did. He had just been shocked by the woman’s shamelessness. The sight of her nakedness remained with him, the way the hot heart of a candle...

It pleased Aliena that they were all together: she and Jack and their children, and Jack’s mother, and Aliena’s brother, and Martha. It was quite like an ordinary family, and Aliena could almost forget that...

My favorite period is World War II, and I’m in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.

A chill December morning dawned, with rags and tatters of mist hanging on the trees like poor people’s washing.

Be a perfectionist.

The first casualty of a civil war was justice, Philip had realized.

How terrible, Jack thought, to be old and know that your life has been wasted.

And where are you going?” His voice was playfully challenging. “To get some breakfast,” she said without stopping.He leered. “I’ve got something for you to eat,” he called after her.”I might bite it off, though,”...

Aliena’s brother, Richard, sometimes reminded her of her father, with a look or a gesture, and that was when she felt a surge of affection.

The CIA’s research program is described in a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

Why do you have to be the same as the others? …Most of them are stupid.

Culture clash is terrific drama.

Since Lenin died, every Soviet leader had been a liar. They had all glossed over what was wrong and declined to acknowledge reality. The most striking characteristic of Soviet leadership for the last sixty-five year...

When you’re about to be turned down, go for a postponement.

Most rich people have a gangster in their ancestry somewhere.

you should first follow the plow if you want to dance the harvest jig.

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.

When you’re thinking, please remember this: excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just as easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility.

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.

There was much talk about why the prime minister had brought back such a troublesome and unpredictable colleague, and the consensus was that he preferred to have Churchill inside the tent spitting out.

When he thought about how he had been slighted, condescended to, manipulated and deceived, he became angry. Obedience was a monastic virtue, but outside the cloisters it had its drawbacks, he thought bitterly. The world...

Philip looked incredulously at the tiny bundle in Johnny’s arms. He reached out a hand tentatively, and lifted a corner of the blanket. He saw a wrinkled pink face, an open toothless mouth and a...

The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century.

When I’m brave and strong, and care for children and the sick and the poor, I become a better person. And when I’m cruel, cowardly, or tell lies, or get drunk, I turn into someone...

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.

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if...

What she needs,’ Tom said aloud ‘is a husband.’ Agnes said crisply, ‘Well, she can’t have mine.

Why is it that those who want to destroy everything good about their country are the quickest to waive the national flag?

He did not really understand the game they were playing: in his world, the best way to get something was to deserve it, not to toady to the giver.

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.

Two blades clashed, ringing like a bell. Like all small boys, Philip thought his father was invincible; and this was the moment when he learned the truth.

I enjoy learning technical details.

In the dynamics of the main family of the story, a rising socialist in England’s postwar government expects his grandparents to be pleased that the local aristocrat’s garden is commandeered to allow the people to...

Why did people manufacture trouble when there was already so much of it in the world?

the war taught me that nothing counts as much as loyalty” “Bullshit. you still haven’t learned that when humans are under pressure, we’re all willing to lie” “even to the people we care?” “we lie...

It was the study hour. Most of the monks were reading. A few were meditating, an activity that was suspiciously similar to dozing.

Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative.

L’eccesso di orgoglio è un peccato molto diffuso, ma un uomo può frustrare altrettanto facilmente il volere di Dio per eccesso di umiltà.

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.

She was unique: there was something abnormal about her, and it was that abnormal something that made her magnetic.

There had been a wonderful atmosphere of liberation and camaraderie. The Russians hated it.

He was like a man who has got used to drinking the finest wine, and now finds that everyday wine thats like vinegar.

Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering meaningless...

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.

All his life he would cherish the memory of an endless caravan of camels alongside the railway line, the laden beasts plodding patiently through the snow, ignoring the twentieth century as it hurtled past them...