“I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.”

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

I can understand companionship.

I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.

Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.

It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.

For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel’s thriller ‘Seven Days in May,’ later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.

It’s odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, ‘I’ve been reading you all my life.’ It makes you feel a slight chill.

I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

Wherefore the heart and the diaphragm are particularly sensitive, they have nothing to do, however, with the operations of the understanding, but of all these the brain is the cause.

My attitude is govern as if you’ve run your last race. That’s not to say I’ve run my last race, but govern with a liberation and a freedom; change your mind frame to operate that way.

Books are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two ‘languages.’ It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves.

When things are not going right, there are satanic forces in operation. What is my solution? To rebuke the condition of sin, death, disease, or whatever it is. I can pray in the Holy Ghost, and that prayer is effectual to bring down every stronghold of the enemy.

If you don’t understand how to run an efficient operation, new machinery will just give you new problems of operation and maintenance.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the state governments, in times of peace and security.

Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.