I was a terrible English student.

All you have the right to ask of life is to choose a battle in this war, make the best you can, and leave the field with honor.

After all, the only thing that is going to save mankind is if enough people live their lives for something or someone other than themselves.

To me, a writer is one of the most important soldiers in the fight for survival of the human race. He must stay at his post in the thick of fire to serve the cause of mankind.

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

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

Why must we fight for the right to live, over and over, each time the sun rises?

You aren't a true husband/man until you've done the work of a wife/women

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

The ability of a person to atone has always been the most remarkable of human features.

A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

We need to live our experience as it is and with our eyes open. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.

As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.

I grew up on American pop culture so everything that I fantasized about to get out of this sort of humdrum world of Bradford was about America. So when we decided to move there I was on the plane.

That to begin with; let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure.

If I had a bowler hat, I'd take it off to the author of this beautifully crafted steampunk novel.

Nobody whoever gave their best ever regretted it.

A director is what a director wants to be. If you want to force something, you can fight to the death and maybe get fired, but it's your job to help push things along.

Truth is better than fiction in terms of telling the story.

I guess I'm a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal.