To me, a writer is one of the most important soldiers in the fight for survival of the human race. He must stay at his post in the thick of fire to serve the cause of mankind.

All you have the right to ask of life is to choose a battle in this war, make the best you can, and leave the field with honor.

After all, the only thing that is going to save mankind is if enough people live their lives for something or someone other than themselves.

My first book was rejected nine times. It turned out to be a best seller, Battle Cry? in 1953.

Often we have no time for our friends but all the time in the world for our enemies.

Why must we fight for the right to live, over and over, each time the sun rises?

You aren't a true husband/man until you've done the work of a wife/women

I was too heavy to be a jockey and too honest to be a producer, so I became a writer

The ability of a person to atone has always been the most remarkable of human features.

A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

A soldier has one item that cannot be neglected. His feet. They are his wheels, his mechanised warfare.

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.

Beyond miracles, what has lasting significance is love. It wasn’t that Jesus healed a leper, but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.

To make the choice for independent survival the great man's wife has to become convinced of her own intrinsic worth.

Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!

All the drug dealers and gang members with whom I dealt had [a cell phone] long before any police officer I knew did.

I don't think enjoying life is an exclusive prerogative of young people.

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

If we were building our navy, rather than reducing our navy to pre-World War I levels, China would not be thinking about increasing its navy to take over the South China Sea.