American Quotes

If you have love in your life, it can make up for a great many things that are missing. If you don't have love in your life, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.

One out of four people in this country is mentally unbalanced. Think of your three closes friends; if they seem OK, then you're the one.

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest - never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principles of equal partnership.

Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them.

Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and repeat to yourself, the most comforting words of all; this, too, shall pass.

Maturity: Be able to stick with a job until it is finished. Be able to bear an injustice without having to get even. Be able to carry money without spending it. Do your duty without being supervised.

Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.

You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.

Probably careful plotting reflects my personality. I am meticulous by nature. I can't imagine speed-writing anything that happens to pop into my head.

I'm a bit of a tech geek myself.

I love sports, as all Bostonians seem to. I love books and movies, as all writers seem to.

I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.

I can't say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.

I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

You can have immediate regrets, but if you look at stuff and say, 'Things happen for a reason', there's a fatalistic thing about it. Something will happen that will justify it in some way.

The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry.

Just five years before that the Russians were our allies.

I've always been interested in science fiction.

I'm very proud of Space 1999. Its success paved the way for other sci-fi shows to follow. My hope is that the DVD release will help it reach a new generation of fans.

I did theatrical caricatures.

Everything that has happened to me is of value to me. As painful as certain things are, and have been, and were, there's a use for those things in my life and in my work.

And the 90% they are not is what I do for a living.

I always treat each take as a rehearsal for the next take. That way you can find stuff and keep adding and playing until they tell me to stop.

Bad guys don't think they're bad guys. Hitler probably thought he was a wonderful guy doing some wonderful and righteous work for Germany.

Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.