There are things I know I know about I dont write about, which I could — Tom Clancy

"Our tools keep getting better, and as a result of that, our lives keep getting better."

"If all you want is plot, go and read a Tom Clancy novels."

"The odds against becoming the next Frederick Forsythe are, of course, somewhere between merely exponential and astronomical-incredible. I’ll settle for a book-jacket with my name on it."

"Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict."

"I like writing. Its the most fun Ive ever had at anything. You can build your own little world and — like a kid with his toy trains, — except instead of trains I have tanks and ships and airplanes and things... I get to make them do all the things I want them to do, and if I dont like the way things work out, I start again."

"The average guy is fairly smart, if you give him the ability to make decisions for himself. Thats the whole premise of America, and thats why America has prospered, and it prospers because if the average guy can get information, he can make his own decisions."

"In a huge embarrassment to the Saudi authorities, the Islamic State adopted official Saudi textbooks for its schools until the extremist group could publish its own books in 2015. Out of 12 works by Muslim scholars republished by the Islamic State, seven are by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century founder of the Saudi school of Islam."

"Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter. There were paper-doll books of her and of the Dionne Quintuplets-five identical girls born to a French-Canadian family and of the famous dollhouse of the actress Colleen Moore, which contained every luxury conceivable in perfect miniature, including a tiny phonograph that played Gershwins Rhapsody in Blue. I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting. I must have seen her dancing with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in The Littlest Rebel, but I remember her less as a movie star than as a presence, like President Roosevelt, or Lindbergh, whose baby had been stolen; but she was a little girl whose face was everywhere on glass mugs and in coloring books as well as in the papers."

"Amy Kofman: Have you read all the books in here? Derrida: No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully."

"Lord!" he said, "when you sell a man a book you dont sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night — theres all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean. Jiminy! If I were the baker or the butcher or the broom huckster, people would run to the gate when I came by — just waiting for my stuff. And here I go loaded with everlasting salvation — yes, maam, salvation for their little, stunted minds — and its hard to make em see it. Thats what makes it worth while — Im doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of. Its a new field, but by the bones of Whitman, its worth while. Thats what this country needs — more books!"

"Printers ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries."

"By the same proportion that a penny saved is a penny gained, the preserver of books is a Mate for the Compiler of them."