Leon Uris

English of course is your major tool, but it is not nearly so important as other aspects of writing for example you have to have some natural ability you can't buy it no one puts it there you're born with it.

I am very proud of this work because it is more about the meaning of the Easter Rising and its relationship to what this whole century has been about, people liberating themselves, freeing themselves.

I do not write for an audience.

I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.

I essentially write for myself.

I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.

I have drawn inspiration from the Marine Corps, the Jewish struggle in Palestine and Israel, and the Irish.

I was a terrible English student.

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

It is extremely important to know what you don't want to find.

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.

Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.

So writing is a very, very difficult position to obtain... and retain.

Usually a good part of the people trying it end up not making it.

Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people and that is what you write about.

Walther Bothe

Direction coupling between the various radiations generated in a nuclear reaction both with one another and with the initiating radiation can also be detected and measured by coincidences; this provides valuable information about the structure of the atomic nuclei.

During this time I had the singular good fortune of being able to discuss the problem constantly with Einstein. Some experiments done at Einstein's suggestion yielded no decisively new result.

In this case, the particle formed has correspondingly less energy, whereas the product nucleus passes into the ground state with emission of the quantity of energy saved as gamma radiation.

Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist.

Rossi was the first to describe another system working with valves in parallel; it has the advantage that it can easily be extended to coincidences between more than two events, and is therefore predominantly used today

Strict conservation of energy in the elementary process had thus been confirmed also by a negative experiment.

The Laboratory for Radioactivity consisted of only two rooms at the time; at a later date, when tests of radioactive substances became more extensive, it expanded into four rooms.

The material particle nature of primary cosmic radiation has been confirmed, although the processes turned out to be extraordinarily more complicated than we had assumed.

This result was confirmed by different researchers using various experimental arrangements.

To demonstrate this simultaneity is by no means trivial, because it may for example happen that the product nucleus always forms in an activated state at first.

J. D. Salinger

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.

How do you know you're going to do something, until you do it?

How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.

It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

John Irving

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

Half my life is an act of revision.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

Richard Bach

If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck.

No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are.

Any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.

The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Allow the world to live as it chooses, and allow yourself to live as you choose.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.

Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.

Avoid problems, and you'll never be the one who overcame them.

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!

Can miles truly separate you from friends... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?

Thomas Hardy

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Fear is the mother of foresight.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Maya Angelou

People will forget what you said
People will forget what you did
But people will never forget how you made them feel.

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

Effective action is always unjust.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.

A great fortune is a great slavery.

A great mind becomes a great fortune.

A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.

A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts.

A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

A man's as miserable as he thinks he is.

A person's fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

All art is but imitation of nature.

All cruelty springs from weakness.

Anger: an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

In war there is no prize for runner-up.

Truman Capote

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

All literature is gossip.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

I can see every monster as they come in.

I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

George S. Patton

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains that victory.

I believe in the old and sound rule that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood.

There is no proof nor yet any denial. We were, We are, and we will be.

My flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not me. Before he finds out where my flanks are, I'll be cutting the bastard's throat.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Through the travail of the ages,
Midst the pomp and toil of war,
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon this star.

So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, but always me.