Study the past if you would define the future. --CONFUCIUS

The people can be forced to fear, but not to love.

If what you know and what you love are the same thing, that's great. But if not, write what you love. I love history, secrets, conspiracies, action, adventure, international settings.

If you want to live your whole life free from pain,you must either be a god or a corpse.

I detest those who deceive me.

I'm a morning person because I learned to write my novels while still practicing law. I would get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and write until other people arrived, around 9. Now I still do that. I start at 6:30 or 7, and I'll write until 11, then take an hour off, then work until about 2 p.m. By then my brain has had enough.

When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was destroyed. Every emperor of China who came in wiped out everything that came before them, to the point that the country completely forgot its past.

It's the circumstances that create fear. How you respond is all you can control. Concentrate on that, and you'll always succeed.

Say it, do it, preach it, shout it, but never, absolutely never, believe your own bullshit.

I don't think my mum ever understood my love of Doctor Who. Surely her strongest memory would have been me, standing at the top of the stairs, crying about how the jelly men were going to get me? Sorry, Mum, for those sleepless nights, but it was with good reason they called it Terror of the Zygons.

If all my friends jumped off a bridge, I wouldn't jump with them. I'd be at the bottom, hoping to catch them.

Follow your heart. It rarely leads you astray. It's thinking that gets us into trouble.

But heroes, at times, had to be fools.

Everybody loves a thing more if it has cost him trouble.

He that endureth to the end, shall be saved.