I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

He who talks more is sooner exhausted.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

Charm is a way of getting the answer ‚Yes‘ without asking a clear question.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.

Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive.

The second time around, I’ll understand that, as a husband, my wife doesn’t care about my opinions. I just need to tell her the things that will continue to help me stack the brownie points.

Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say ‚LOL.‘ Just what? But it means ‚laugh.‘ Why don’t you just laugh? What are you doing?

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

I meet people overseas that know five languages – that the only language I’m comfortable in is English.

People do not make wars; governments do.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

The way I talk is bizarre.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

What makes you a SEAL, what makes you a SEAL is being a good tactician on the battle field, understanding how to shoot, move, and communicate, knowing small unit maneuver warfare. That’s what makes a good SEAL, and so that is the course of instruction that I taught, was getting SEAL platoons ready for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.

There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.

The way I define ‚intelligent design‘ is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.

You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

The only way I hear gossip is if it’s big enough and loud enough for my friends to bring it up to me. Or if it’s, like, a big untrue ordeal from my publicist – and she hates making that phone call!

Talking isn’t doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.