Quotes from David Morrell

The flaw of an amateur is to assume what's in our head is what's on the page.

To all librarians everywhere, God bless you.

As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.

His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky.

Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.

Just because somebody smiles when he hands me a bag of shit, that doesn't mean I have to take it. I don't give a damn how friendly he is. It's what he does that matters.

there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them

Sometimes life kicks you in the teeth with an irony that a self-respecting fiction writer would be ashamed to invent.

You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer.

If he had really wanted to control himself, he could have. He simply had not wanted to control himself. To live his way, he had been determined to fight anyone who interfered. So all right then, in a way he had fought for a principle. But it was not that simple, because he had also been proud and delighted to show how good he was at fighting.

Except that it was no more home, just the place where he had grown up, and that first day back, touring the once familiar places only made him realize that he had already lived close to half his life.

The posters and rock-star buttons and banners were valueless without the perspective of the mind that had attached significance to them. Souvenirs have no worth without nostalgia, after all. They're meaningless if a memory isn't linked to them.

Learn to respect a craftsman's talent, to realize that a task done well seems easy but is terribly difficult.

We act upon assumptions that control our view of reality, even though reality might be quite different... By definition, what is unthinkable isn't part of our reality... your assumptions about what is possible prevent you from accurately seeing the reality before you.

if people weren't sinners, every intelligence network would be out of business

I fear I am losing my mind. I do not mean "losing my grasp of reality." I know perfectly well what is happening. But I am powerless to prevent the outcome. Each day, I have less strength of mind to resist.

First Blood Rambo knife by Jimmy Lile. It features a saw, a guard with straight and Philips screwdriver heads, holes in the guard for a wrist lanyard

Cavanaugh's knife, Ernest Emerson's CQC-7W. The hook at the top opens the blade as the knife is drawn from a pocket. (Emersonknives.com)

La Griffe, "The Claw." Simple and small. The index finger goes through the hole near the blade. Favored by climbers and boaters. Designed by Fredric Perrin, manufactured by Ernest Emerson. (Emersonknoves.com)

Hey, what about you? That monastery didn't make you soft, I hope." "The Cistercians?" Chris laughed. "Make me soft? They're the toughest order in the Catholic Church." "They really don't talk?" "Not only that. They believe in brutal daily work. I might as well have spent another six years in Special Forces.

It's not polite to pass out when you've got company. Conversation

In my novel, 'First Blood,' Rambo died. In the films, he lives.

I have a graduate degree from Penn State. I studied at Penn State under a noted Hemingway scholar, Philip Young. I had an interest in thrillers, and it occurred to me that Hemingway wrote many action scenes: the war scenes in 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' come to mind. But the scenes don't feel pulpy.

Anybody who sits down to write, and they think 'thriller,' maybe shouldn't be thinking that way. Maybe we should be thinking 'novel,' maybe 'thriller' way in the background, but that these are real people to whom things are happening. It just happens to be a hell of an exciting story.