“Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying”

I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.

I invented the historical spy novel.

I’m not really a mass market writer.

I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

I read very little contemporary anything.

I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.

If you’re a writer, you’re always working.

I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don’t want to be the person to stick that in your brain.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

I’m a genre writer.

I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said

I didn’t know what to do. How do you tell an eight-year-old boy his mother’s going to die? I tried. In my own stumbling way I tried to prepare Jim for it.

All, without any exception, will certainly know their real Self.

I only know one yoga: ‘You Go.’

You know, these month – or two-month-long endeavors that millions of dollars are based on.

Eternity! How know we but we stand On the precipitous and crumbling verge Of Time e’en now, Eternity below?

I knew he wouldn’t be able to close his eyes to it.

Unless you paddle for the wave, you’ll never know if you could catch it. But once you do… Ride it as long as you can. Love as long as you can.

And what you know from the depths of your own heart to the peaks of your soul to be true. What happens after that is up to you.