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Speak your dialogue out loud. If it sounds like the way people talk, then write it down.

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
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More quotes by Tom Clancy

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Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.
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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It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.
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Fix your eyes forward on what you can do, not back on what you cannot change.
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Wars are begun by frightened men.
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Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if X happened? That's how you start.
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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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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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The Only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read
Tom Clancy
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Washington D.C. is about 300 square miles surrounded by realty.
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Success will ruin your life.
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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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.
Tom Clancy
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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.
Tom Clancy
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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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Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
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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People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots.
Tom Clancy
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Even true believers had consciences, Too bad.
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