Quotes by Tom Clancy

Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.

One thing about flying that he never got used to was that no matter how awful the weather was on the ground, if you flew high enough you could always find the sun.

A lively discussion is usually helpful, because the hottest fire makes the hardest steel.

How strange that he should feel trapped by plans he himself had set in motion.

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: What if? and What next? (A third question, What now?, is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but its more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if X happened? Thats how you start.

There are only two ways we can be beaten: we die or we give up. And were not giving up.

To a man, professional soldiers despised terrorists, and each would dream about getting them in an even-up-battle; the idea of the Field of Honor had never died for the real professionals. It was the place where the ultimate decision was made on the basis of courage and skill, on the basis of manhood itself, and it was this concept that marked the professional soldier as a romantic, a person who truly believed in the rules.

Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.

It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.

People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.

Diplomacy was like a card game. The difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand.

There is no seamen in the world who prefers a slow ship to a fast one. The painters painted better, the cooks took a little more time with the meals, and the technicians tightened the bolts just a little more. Their ship was no longer a cripple, and pride broke out in the crew like a rainbow after a summer shower.

The media could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.

Not every story started off big enough to notice.

One presidential advisor to another: If the world made sense, wed all have to find honest work.

The point of life was to press on, to do the best you can, to make the world a better place.

I understand why we do that now. It’s a help, not a threat. It’s something to remind you how important words are. Ideas are important. Principles are important. Words are important. Your word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are.

The only real difference between a wise man and a fool, Moore knew, was that the wise man tended to make more serious mistakes—and only because no one trusted a fool with really crucial decisions; only the wise had the opportunity to lose battles, or nations.

Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.

I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.