Quotes from Frederick Forsyth

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

The man in gray decided to take the Glen Suite of diamonds at midnight. Provided they were still in the apartment safe and the occupants away. This he needed to know. So he watched and he waited. At half past seven he was rewarded.

The British have always coped without becoming a dictatorship.

In the 66 years that I have been alive, there has not been one hour, of one day, of one month, of one year, when there has not been a threat aimed at us.

mood other than satisfaction and that is rage.

Un instante placentero y desbordante de vida gloriosa vale más que toda una existencia en las sombras.» Y

With terrorists, whether al-Fatah or Black September or the new, supposedly religious breed, the rage and the hatred come first.

there was no such thing as collective guilt. But we Germans have been told for twenty years that we are all guilty. Do you believe that?

in police work ninety-nine percent of the effort is routine, unspectacular enquiry, checking and double-checking, laboriously building up a web of parts until the parts become a whole, the whole becomes a net, and the net finally encloses the criminal with a case that will not just make headlines but stand up in court. He

They were all copies of originals made by the British Admiralty, and the best in the world.

Vive la mort, vive la guerre, vive le sacre mercenaire

And you?" "Oh, I will go back to Century House and start again. And go back each night to my small flat and listen to my music and eat my baked beans. And you will go back to Nikki, my friend, and hold her very tight, and write your books and forget all this. Hamburg, Vienna, Malta, Tripoli, Cyprus—forget it. It's all over.

That is why I believe that this coterie of vain mandarins and cowardly politicians stained the honor of my country forever, and I will never forgive them.

The exam markers must have been somewhat bewildered to be told that when the Armada appeared, Francis Drake was playing with his balls.

There is a French adage, "To understand everything is to forgive everything." When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive. Yes, one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget.

staring intently at the

Along the wide straight road he pushed the car well over eighty miles an hour and kept the tachometre needle flickering just below the start of the red band.

A journalist should never join the Establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it. In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money, and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached, like a bird on a rail, watching, noting, probing, commenting, but never joining. In short, an outsider.

America can take many things, but she cannot take massive casualties. Saddam can. They don't matter to him.

the SS had made the two initials of its name, and the twin-lightning symbol of its standard, synonymous with inhumanity in a way that no other organisation before or since has been able to do.

Yevgeni Krilov knew he was in a room with the richest man in Russia, possibly the world. No one did a ruble's worth of business in Russia without paying a percentage fee to the supreme boss, albeit through a complex network of shell companies and front men.

The United Nations had created a military "peacekeeping" force—the usual lunacy of sending a force to keep the peace where there was no peace to keep, then forbidding them to create the peace, ordering them instead to watch the slaughter without interfering.

The technique of beaming a ray on to window glass and reading from the vibrations the conversation going on inside had been used against the American embassy in Moscow in the Cold War and required the reconstruction of the entire building.

The most frills-free airliner cannot compare with the rear of a C-130. No soundproofing, no heating, no pressurization and certainly no trolley service. The Tracker knew it would never get quieter but it would become savagely cold as the air thinned. Nor is the rear leak-proof. Despite the oxygen-delivering mask on his face, the place by now stank of kerosene and oil.