Gary Haynes > Gary's Quotes

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
― Tom Clancy

“Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.”
― James Lee Burke

“If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.”
― James Lee Burke, The Glass Rainbow

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Beware the fury of a patient man”
― Tom Clancy

“The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read”
― Tom Clancy

“Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.”
― Thomas Berger

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“there is no collective guilt,...guilt is individual, like salvation.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File

“I write thrillers for the same reason that people read them – it's escapism.”
― Ken McClure

“He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him.
By the time they freed him, he was a different man.”
― Gary Haynes, State of Honour

“The remnants of a place, the buildings flattened or hollowed, the facades bullet-ridden. A fractured place, with a fractured people.”
― Gary Haynes, State of Attack

“Hours before, the women, plagued by flies, had held aloft sacred wooden icons and had wailed for their loss.”
― Gary Haynes, State of Attack

“In the eerie silence, Basilios sensed movement above. He glanced up and saw a flock of cranes flying south, their long necks outstretched. Even the birds are leaving, he thought.”
― Gary Haynes, State of Attack

“His men were conscripts. A few still wore their padded khaki jackets and mustard-yellow blouses. Most, their green field tunics and forage caps. All the clothing was lice-ridden and smeared with soft ash. Months of exposure to frozen winds had darkened their skins and narrowed their eyes. They’d been engaged in hazardous reconnaissance missions. They’d slept rough and had existed on a diet of raw husks and dried horse meat.”
― Gary Haynes, The Blameless Dead

“He wound down the window and looked out at the forest, just to be sure, a habit from days long gone. The slight breeze rippled through the darkened treetops. Nothing more. Satisfied, he inhaled the scent of the pines, his nostrils flaring. The smell of citrus orange mixed with tinges of vanilla and ammonia evoked memories, as it always did. He was overcome by a sense of regret so profound that he felt unable to move or speak.”
― Gary Haynes, The Blameless Dead

“He bent over, flipped open the brass clasps. It had been decades since he’d seen her, so long, in fact, that he sometimes wondered if that time had been imagined. But when he took out the black and white photograph, marred and fading, beneath his old military uniform, it was if it had all happened a few days before.
 ”
― Gary Haynes, The Blameless Dead