I was very disciplined when home - lights out for the girls at 9:00, two hours of writing for me. It was murder on my marriage.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.

I hope I will get to novelize my present circumstances at some point. I have some great stories to tell.

Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.

I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.

One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually fiction is just better.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.

God will only reveal Himself to you when you begin to regard His people

To be a leader meant that sometimes you had to look away from the pain

The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.

How sweet it is!

Flew concluded that research into DNA had 'shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved'.

The gondola of London [a hansom].

Fire taps something ancient and vital in each of us, something both snarling and reverential.

Buying coffee on the street instead of in a Starbucks is the poor man's way to get rich. In other words, you will never get rich by scratching out ten cents from your dollar.

A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.

The battle cry sort of gave you away. Try not to yell next time.