316 Quotes by Tom Clancy

If you don’t write the book, the book ain’t gonna get written.

I remember when Deng said, ‘It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.’ To which Mao responded with a livid snarl: ‘What emperor said that?

Most things in here don’t react well to bullets.

There was nothing like an appeal to honor. It was a virtue that all craved, even those who lacked it. Fundamentally, honor was itself a debt, a code of behavior, a promise, something inside yourself that you owed to the others who saw it in you.

It’s all about intelligence; and intelligence comes down to a bunch of faceless bureaucrats sifting through all this crap.

You just had to apply judgment to your action, and such judgment came with experience – but experience often came from bad decisions.

She didn’t strike me as a “crossword in ink” kind of girl.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is not the job of government to be the national nanny. The average citizen can look after his or her own needs without assistance from somebody who works here in Washington.

We sink ships and try to pretend that they’re just ships – things without people in them. It’s dishonest, but we do it anyway.