American novelist (1960- )
The U.S. overall has an excellent record when it comes to treatment of POWs and persons listed as foreign combatants, but the longer the war against terrorism goes on, the more tempting it is for our guys to stoop to the other side's level. After all, they're only human, and they might come to view the person sitting across from them as someone not worthy of any rights at all.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Camel Club
Human beings are infinitely fallible, completely unreliable. Science is not. Science is absolute. Under strict principles, if you do A and B, then C will occur. This rarely happens if you inject the inefficiences of humanity into the process.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
He'd been given an assignment to write about teen beauty pageants ... which he'd accepted because he enjoyed blood sports as much as the next person.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Christmas Train
It's hard, Cotton. To let yourself love something you know you may never have.
DAVID BALDACCI
Wish You Well
Well, you live your life the way you want, I live mine the way I want. We see who makes it farther.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Simple Truth
Arrogant people habitually overestimated their own abilities and underestimated everyone else's.
DAVID BALDACCI
Absolute Power
As my father wrote, one's courage, hope, and spirit can be severely tried by the happenstance of life. But as I learned on this Virginia mountain, so long as one never loses faith, it is impossible to ever truly be alone.
DAVID BALDACCI
Wish You Well
It’s a crazy kind of schedule but five or six years ago, I had an idea for a book and wrote it rather quickly. All of a sudden I found that two books a year, spring and fall, was something I could reasonably do. I’m always chasing the next story.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Telegraph, November 16, 2015
It had been so long since we were a family that I had almost forgotten the joy that came with having one. All the small and large moments, many that I had taken for granted while they were occuring, no doubt bolstered by the certainty that there would be many more. Yet such endearing and memorable engagements in life are promised to no one. They come and go and one has to be aware that there is no assurance they will ever come again.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Finisher
People like to talk about other people's misery; it makes them feel their own life is somehow better when it usually isn't.
DAVID BALDACCI
Absolute Power
Small mistakes tend to lead to large ones. Ours is a lifetime appointment, and all you have is your reputation. Once it's gone, it doesn't come back.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Simple Truth
Lots of people don't talk about their military service.... A pretty accurate rule of thumb is the people who did the most talk about it the least. The blowhards are the ones who did squat.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
He thanked God for allowing him to live. So many hours of swimming, and then being picked up by the boat. In the vastness of the Gulf, what were the odds of that without divine intervention? The sharks had also miraculously left him alone. He had to attribute that to his prayers as well.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Forgotten
He earned a national reputation managing large political campaigns, turning them into media-driven extravaganzas with emphasis on sound bites and perception over any kind of substance, and his win rate was astonishingly high. That probably said more for the gullibility of the modern voter than the high standards of the modern candidate.
DAVID BALDACCI
Split Second
Life doesn't work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything you think you're supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won't get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.
DAVID BALDACCI
One Summer
It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realized. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Whole Truth
You made up the truth and then buried the real thing under so much garbage that people grew weary of trying to dig through it and instead just accepted what you offered. It was the easy way out and humans were programmed to always go that way.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Whole Truth
As a lawyer, I was paid to write persuasively. I was paid to take the same set of facts the other side had and make you believe that my version of it was true, while the other side was doing the exact same thing.
DAVID BALDACCI
interview, The Strand
I started writing screenplays, writing scripts for films. Got an agent in L.A., and actually had some producers interested in my work. I’d always wanted to write a novel, and an idea hit me in the early 90s about the president and the burglar and all of that. I spent three years writing at night while I was practicing law, and I thought it was a good story. I sent it out to agents, and my life changed. I think when I was in high school, trying to get short stories published, is when I first had this idea that maybe I could be a writer. But even back then I thought, this is only a hobby, a sideline; you’re gonna have to get a real job in life, and this is something you’ll do at night or early in the morning and maybe sell a story here and there and that’ll be pretty much your career.
DAVID BALDACCI
interview, The Strand
It had always bothered Tom that women thought they could win an argument with a man simply by appealing to his baser instincts, by holding out the mere possibility of award-winning carnal knowledge. It was the gender equivalent of a preemptive nuclear strike. He thought it unfair and, quite frankly, disrespectful of the entire male population.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Christmas Train