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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.

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
Question
Third
Happened
Thirds
Asks
Begins
Start
Cry
Next
Foundation
Two
Questions
Speculative
Form
Novel
Novels
Every
Minutes
Author

More quotes by Tom Clancy

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Privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded to a skipper.
Tom Clancy
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I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Tom Clancy
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Even true believers had consciences, Too bad.
Tom Clancy
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In battle, you forgive a man anything except an unwillingness to take risks. Sometimes you have to put it on the line.
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.
Tom Clancy
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Remember, for every shot you fire, someone, somewhere, is making money.
Tom Clancy
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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.
Tom Clancy
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What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else.
Tom Clancy
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Fix your eyes forward on what you can do, not back on what you cannot change.
Tom Clancy
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Success will ruin your life.
Tom Clancy
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There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.
Tom Clancy
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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.
Tom Clancy
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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.
Tom Clancy
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Washington D.C. is about 300 square miles surrounded by realty.
Tom Clancy
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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.
Tom Clancy
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Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravada editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service.
Tom Clancy
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Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.
Tom Clancy
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I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing their lollypops.
Tom Clancy
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Ice hockey is the closest thing to religion permitted by the Soviet Union.
Tom Clancy
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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.
Tom Clancy