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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.

Tom Clancy

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Tom Clancy
Age: 66 †
Born: 1947
Born: April 12
Died: 2013
Died: October 1
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Prosaist
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr.
Thomas Leo Tom Clancy Jr.
Thomas Leo Tom Clancy
Jr.
Thomas Clancy
Thomas L. Clancy
Understand
Helping
Ideas
Remind
Important
Threat
Something
Principles
Word
Help
Words

More quotes by Tom Clancy

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I think about the characters I've created and then I sit down and start typing and see what they will do. There's a lot of subconscious thought that goes on. It amazes me to find out, a few chapters later, why I put someone in a certain place when I did. It's spooky.
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Speak your dialogue out loud. If it sounds like the way people talk, then write it down.
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If you don't write the book, the book ain't gonna get written.
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Life was such a strange thing, so permanent when one had it, so fleeting when it was lost- and those who lost it could never tell you what it was like, could they?
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Surviving is much more painful than death.
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Keep at it! The one talent that's indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Do not try to commit art. Just tell the damned story.
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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 it's more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if X happened? That's how you start.
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America is the most inventive country in the world. Why? Because everybody has access to information. In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them.
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Learn to write the same way you learn to play golf. You do it and keep doing it until you get it right.
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That's the ultimate pornography. There's nothing more pornographic than glorifying war.
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Even true believers had consciences, Too bad.
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A lawyer is just like an attack dog, only without a conscience.
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All field agents have some cowboy in them – even the ones from New York.
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In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.
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Back in pre-Revolutionary America cruel and unusual punishment meant the rack and burning at the stake... in more recent rulings it has been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons.
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Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians.
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I haven't got any fan mail from Osama bin Laden. I have no reason to believe he reads my stuff I'll never decide for commercial reasons to put something in that endangers our national security. You just can't do that.
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The U.S. Military is us. There is no truer representation of a country than the people that it sends into the field to fight for it. The people who wear our uniform and carry our rifles into combat are our kids, and our job is to support them, because they're protecting us.
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Anti-Catholicism is the last respectable prejudice. You can't hate black people anymore, of course, and you can't hate homosexuals anymore, but you can hate all the Catholics you want.
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The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.
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