Robert Ludlum

“I start every book with something that outrages me. I'm outraged by the FBI, the CIA, and computers that seem to have catalogued our lives. Power too often is accompanied by irresponsibility.”

“I have always preferred conflict of individuals over the battle of extreme ideologies.”

“A theater person should know what holds an audience and what does not.”

“Before taking her into the library, my wife told me she was an old friend in a marriage crisis. A fatuous lie; at her age there are no crises left in marriage, only acceptance and extraction. (General Villiers)”

“I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn't really tell a story. To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it's got to be a craft.. You've got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I have sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what's going to happen.”

“I try as best I can to enter the realm of nuances of human behavior.”

“You appear to be a mass of contradictions," Dr Washburn said. "There's a subsurface violence almost always in control, but very much alive. There's also a pensiveness that seems painful for you, yet you rarely give vent to the anger that pain must provoke.”

“She's an old soldier's woman, and she has antennae for things that often escape the officer in the field.”

“The cruelest thing you can do to a person who's living in panic is to offer him or her hope that turns out false. When the crash comes its intolerable.”

“Characterization is integral to the theatrical experience.”

“Life is extremely complicated.”

“And then the earth, the world, the planet, the galaxy, and the entire solar system went crazy.”

“Truth is neither joyful nor sad, neither good nor bad. It is simply truth.”

“There is nothing in a crowded street more noticeable than a man running ― unless it is a woman.”

“The mind plays tricks. It rejects things until it thinks ― or something tells it ― that the remembering can be handled.”

“Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.”

“Greater economic power will be in the hands of too few.”

“I don't believe that my first name is Leo or that my last name is Tolstoy. I'm a storyteller.”