David Baldacci

“I'm a wicked ping-pong player.”

“It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realised. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry.”

“You know what kind of person it takes to run for President? Not normal. They could start out okay, but by the time they reach that level they've sold their soul to the devil so many times and stomped the guts out of enough people that they are definitely not like you and me, not even close.”

“I'm tired of people screaming about price and forgetting about the content.”

“As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice. You see a lot of people who should have been punished and are not, and people who were punished wrongfully are not vindicated. Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.”

“Politics is a dirty, ruthless business, Agent Robie. It makes the intelligence sector look relatively honorable by comparison.”

“I'd read a lot of thrillers about politicians and presidents, but never one where you flip the stereotypes and make good people bad and bad people good.”

“Most people associate reading with laying on the beach. They don't see that it's crucial for a democracy!”

“john was smart, but he was also a young male with a usually empty belly. sometimes it was simple as that”

“I'm scattered, and then that last hundred pages, bam, I'm a laser.”

“The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Ft. Benning, Ga., for military training, and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like.”

“A smart man understood that victory was not inevitable. An even smarter man knew that defeat was never really total if you figured out how to handle the aftermath with skill and just the right spin.And the smartest men of all, even when they lost, they actually won.”

“In every thriller written about Washington, particularly after 9/11, there are good guys and there are bad guys, and there's no gray area at all.”

“In some ways, it was far easier to be bad than good. When you're bad, you don't care what happens to anyone other than yourself. When you're trying to do god, you have to worry about everyone.”

“-“I remember my father telling me about England’s redrawing of India’s boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused.”-“You keep proving my point, Tom, that we’re rotten to the core.”-“My point is we never learn!”

“Pender laughed. "Verify? In this day and age? Who cares about verifying anything? It's all about the speed. Who gets there first defines the truth. You know that as well as any man living.”

“Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.”