I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.

I think it's a bit like coming to the end of a book. The plot's in its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren't fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can't be far off.

The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War.

About the nicest thing God ever invented was alcohol. He's proud of it, too. The Bible's full of kind remarks about booze.

Strange, isn't it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.

We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.

This is an excellent martini — sort of tastes like it isn't there at all, just a cold cloud.