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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
Start
Every
Speculative
Begins
Novel
Question
Happened

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The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man's soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.
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There are people in government who don't want other people to know what they know. It's just another example of elitism. And I spit on elitism. Show me an elitist, and I'll show you a loser.
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Fix your eyes forward on what you can do, not back on what you cannot change.
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The only real difference between a wise man and a fool, Moore knew, was that the wise man tended to make more serious mistakes—and only because no one trusted a fool with really crucial decisions only the wise had the opportunity to lose battles, or nations.
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It's not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.
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Bill Clinton is a man who thinks international affairs means dating a girl from out of town.
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The point of life was to press on, to do the best you can, to make the world a better place.
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There is more to military units than hardware. There is the character of the unit's personnel: their strengths, experience, and knowledge, their ability to get along and work together amid the horrors of the battlefield. There is an almost undefinable quality. That quality is the Marine Corps' secret weapon. Their edge. That quality is their ethos.
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Washington D.C. is about 300 square miles surrounded by realty.
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I wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you're immortal.
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The good old days are now.
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Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.
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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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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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Speak your dialogue out loud. If it sounds like the way people talk, then write it down.
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Success will ruin your life.
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Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.
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That's the ultimate pornography. There's nothing more pornographic than glorifying war.
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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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