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.

Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime.

The President has a quick and able mind, though not everybody gives him that, not by a long shot.

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

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

A leader can't dash ahead around the bend out of sight.

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.