I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.

So writing is a very, very difficult position to obtain… and retain.

In God’s scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this...

I essentially write for myself.

The first thing you have to do is get immersed in the project, organizing yourself, knowing what you are going after and not going after.

Like so many creative men of his school he was hounded by an incessantrestlessness.

I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.

The Jews struggled and stuck together. Their tenacity kept them alive. The fact that my book was a part of this struggle is my greatest achievement.

Anything to declare? the customs inspector said.”Two pound of uncut heroin and a manual of pornographic art,” Mark answered, looking about for Kity. All Americans are comedians, the inspector thought, as he passed Parker through....

I have drawn inspiration from the Marine Corps, the Jewish struggle in Palestine and Israel, and the Irish.

Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about...

Usually a good part of the people trying it end up not making it.

Huxley: “Tell me something Bryce, do you know the difference between a Jersey, a Guernsey, a Holstein, and an Ayershire?”Bryce: “No.”Huxley: “Seabags Brown does.”Bryce: “I don’t see what that has to do…”Huxley: “What do you...

I was a terrible English student.

Talent isn’t enough. You need motivation-and persistence, too: what Steinbeck called a blend of faith and arrogance. When you’re young, plain old poverty can be enough, along with an insatiable hunger for recognition. You have...

Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people and that is what you write about.

[She said the book that changed her life was] Exodus … a sense of identification.

I was too heavy to be a jockey and too honest to be a producer, so I became a writer.

I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don’t make a writer mad, he’ll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.

You can try to reach an audience, but you just write what comes out of you and you just hope that it is accepted. You do not write specifically to a generation.

Often we have no time for our friends but all the time in the world for our enemies.

It is extremely important to know what you don’t want to find.

A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won’t hurt...

You start with your life experience and then you can become more inventive, but the human relationships always come from your own life experience.

On one occasion I went to Afghanistan to look at the borders and learn something about the situation there to see if my book was there?and it wasn’t.

My first book was rejected nine times. It turned out to be a best seller, Battle Cry? in 1953.

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot...

You usually don’t know what you are going to write about so you go to the places and talk to the people who were identified with the events.

English of course is your major tool, but it is not nearly so important as other aspects of writing for example you have to have some natural ability you can’t buy it no one puts...

My greatest accomplishment is Exodus. It changed a lot of peoples lives, it changed the conception of the Jewish people in the international scene.

For an instant he was able to cross the line and understand this strange loyalty of Jew to Jew. Those Jews who lived free in England were only there due to some quirk of fate...

Your book catches on like any other new product and once it does you are there and how you behave when you get there is up to you.

I am very proud of this work because it is more about the meaning of the Easter Rising and its relationship to what this whole century has been about, people liberating themselves, freeing themselves.

My guiding thought throughout was that the real Marine story had not been told. We were a different breed of men who looked at war in a different way.

Who is left in the ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of force within his soul will stand in defiance against any...

I do not write for an audience.

Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.

Today a great shot for freedom was heard. I think it stands a chance of being heard forever. It marls a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The beginning of the return...