The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing their lollypops.

if you don't write it down, then it never happened

Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.

Danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear.

If you don't write it down, it never happened.Cathy (& Jack) Ryan

The extraneous duties, in a sense, were the job.

You couldn't allow yourself to get bored. THAT would be a fight.

Poor people have poor options. Chavez found the Army almost by accident, and had found it a true open of security and opportunity and fellowship and respect.

He had to grow his own NCOs.

I inherited curiosity from my Dad.

Clancy comments that the subtleties of national character can impact the world stage by making espionage more difficult. Americans were quirky by nature, making the sorts of eccentric moves that had to be followed up on as potential espionage cues. Russians, on the other hand, were too orderly by nature to make such distractions appear natural.

Courage was not something one picked out of the air. It was something like a bank account. You could withdraw only so much before it was necessary to stop, to take the time to make new deposits.

It wasn't an epidemic yet because no one knew about it.

A rare academic (was) a man who knew what he didn't know.

A commander's pride got his soldiers dead.

Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.

One thing about flying that he never got used to was that no matter how awful the weather was on the ground, if you flew high enough you could always find the sun.

A lively discussion is usually helpful, because the hottest fire makes the hardest steel.

How strange that he should feel trapped by plans he himself had set in motion.

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "What now?", is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it's more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

There are only two ways we can be beaten: we die or we give up. And we're not giving up.

To a man, professional soldiers despised terrorists, and each would dream about getting them in an even-up-battle; the idea of the Field of Honor had never died for the real professionals. It was the place where the ultimate decision was made on the basis of courage and skill, on the basis of manhood itself, and it was this concept that marked the professional soldier as a romantic, a person who truly believed in the rules.

Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.

It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.

People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.

Diplomacy "was like a card game. The difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand.

There is no seamen in the world who prefers a slow ship to a fast one. The painters painted better, the cooks took a little more time with the meals, and the technicians tightened the bolts just a little more. Their ship was no longer a cripple, and pride broke out in the crew like a rainbow after a summer shower.

The media "could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.

Not every story started off big enough to notice.

One presidential advisor to another: "If the world made sense, we'd all have to find honest work.

The point of life was to press on, to do the best you can, to make the world a better place.

I understand why we do that now. It’s a help, not a threat. It’s something to remind you how important words are. Ideas are important. Principles are important. Words are important. Your word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are.

The only real difference between a wise man and a fool, Moore knew, was that the wise man tended to make more serious mistakes—and only because no one trusted a fool with really crucial decisions; only the wise had the opportunity to lose battles, or nations.

Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.

I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Cheating was a concept both foreign and integral to the fighting of wars.

He was learning to curse his newly acquired status as resident genius.

The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read

Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravada editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service.

They loved their country largely because they controlled it.

Ice hockey is the closest thing to religion permitted by the Soviet Union.

Intelligence people are no different from anybody else. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it reinforces how brilliant they think they are.

The assistant commander at any post is supposed to be a ruthless son of a bitch.

Comrade, you can deceive us. Anyone can―for a time. But not a very long time.

He had to do so many things and make each appear as though it were the only thing he had to do. He had to compartmentalize everything, when on one task to pretend that the others didn't exist.