The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work.

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

The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.

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.

Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don't think so now you will later on, more and more.

War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.