I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.

A reversal is just anything that's a surprise. It's a way of keeping the audience interested.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.

I love the idea of spies in love. How would it work between two people who were so programmed to lie and be suspicious, who have a whole life based on pretence?

You have to know human behaviour … And the quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You’ll never write above what you know about people.

The people in the Philippines are so extraordinarily nice.

No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.

Different people work different ways.

Fear changes everything. We're animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I'm not exempt from that.

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

Those who trust us educate us.

Love is the most beautiful flower in the garden of life.

It doesn't pay to trust a lettered man in the road, Brothers, their heads are full of other man's ideas.

All people should be treated the same way on earth.

You probably only know what you've read [about Marilyn Monroe].You didn't know her. The people who talk about her didn't know her either.

Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.

Life is not cured, Mr. Gilner." Dr. Mahmoud leans in. "Life is managed.

A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species.

The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.

One should not focus on the differences between people but look for commonality and similarity.