Quotes from Nelson DeMille

A man only unsheathes his jambiyah if he is going to use it.

You can always tell a police state, or a country at war, by how government vehicles move

Hollis said to Banks, "Once I bombed only politically approved targets. We lost the war.

Computers are good, but they isolate the user and the information. People forget what they can't see.

I'm a good Methodist and a bitch. But only once a month.

never ceased to amaze him how a discredited philosophy and a repressive nation still attracted idealists.

But, you know, shit happens even when you have a shit shield with you.

When shit happens, you turn it into fertilizer for your tree of knowledge.

How many people from the Mideast take a cultural sensitivity class before they come to America? Why is it always us who have to be sensitive to other cultures? Works both ways.

I only drink with other people, or when I'm alone.

circumlocution

You criminalize what normal people want, and you make everybody a criminal. And when everybody's a criminal, nobody's a criminal.

I suppose you could say that the Russians had a big appetite for life, or you could say they were dissolute and decadent, which was the opposite side of the same ruble.

The danger's passed, the wrong is righted; the veteran's ignored, the soldier's slighted.

It's not unusual to assign a husband and wife together when possible.

When I was in boarding school, which is English-run, I read a very beautiful passage---something that George VI said in his Christmas message to the English people, in the darkest year of the war, 'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied, Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a knownew way.

Motive is tricky, and you can't ascribe a motive and then try to make it fit the crime.

Being a genius doesn't make you smart, happy, or successful. In fact, sometimes the opposite. Studies have shown that people with genius-level I.Q.s are often unhappy, alienated from the society around them, impatient with people of lesser intelligence, angry at how stupid and ignorant the world is, and generally self-absorbed and untrusting. In fact, they only trust themselves and they rarely take the advice of others.

lies are like cockroaches—if you see one, there are more.

cold as a well-digger's ass in Maine.

me as though I might need another analogy, which I didn't

He had a clean shot, but he also had an informal rule of trying not to kill anyone within an hour of landing in a new country

totally incompetent blowhard, an idiot and a fool.

I hit him with a left hook, and he toppled back onto the grass.