Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy
Thomas Leo Clancy, Jr.was an American novelist and video game designer best known for his technically detailed espionage and military-science story lines set during and after the Cold War. Seventeen of his novels were bestsellers, and more than 100 million copies of his books are in print. His name was also used on movie scripts written by ghost writers, nonfiction books on military subjects, and video games. He was a part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles and vice-chairman of their community...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 April 1947
CityBaltimore, MD
CountryUnited States of America
There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told, and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.
We cannot fail to win unless we fail to try.
Liberation and equal-rights issues notwithstanding, it was a man's job to make a woman feel cherished and respected.
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.
There is an old saying: In history nothing is true but the names and dates. In fiction everything is true but the names and dates. The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.
Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.
You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf... You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired – it’s hard work.
It is a principle of diplomacy that one must know something of the truth in order to lie convincingly.
Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.
I think about the characters I've created and then I sit down and start typing and see what they will do. There's a lot of subconscious thought that goes on. It amazes me to find out, a few chapters later, why I put someone in a certain place when I did. It's spooky.
It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.
Suspense is achieved by information control: What you know. What the reader knows. What the characters know.