Tom Clancy
American author of both fiction and non-fiction, mostly related to the military, terrorism, and international affairs.
Victory comes only to those prepared to make it, and take it.
Certainly, we live in a different world ... for the first time in all of known human history, we live in a world absent of the likelihood of superpower conflict. Now we live in a world in which there are superpowers, but we're not butting heads all the time. That's a very good thing for the world... but... there's still a few bad guys out there.
There's been historical conflict between China and Russia for well over 1,000 years. ... People forget that the Mongols came all the way to the Baltic Sea and all the way to where St. Petersburg is today ... And the Russians have a good sense of history and they remember that.
I wanted a different way in which to tell my stories. Coming up with concepts for computer games gives me another avenue of creative expression. It's not just me telling the story, it's me designing the idea for a story and letting the players write their own ending.
There are things I know I know about I don't write about, which I could not responsibly put into my books. Interestingly enough, though, the scariest one of those things is not classified at all. But nevertheless, I don't write about it, because it would make the world a somewhat more dangerous place.
What underclass? I mean you know, what underclass? Do you know any of them? Do they have automobiles? Most of them probably do. Do most of them have television sets? Do most of them have telephones? Well, if they can afford automobiles, they can afford computers. And since they have television sets, they already have access to communications technology. And since they have telephones, they can talk to one another. Wherein are they deprived?
I think it's going to be remembered as the last major war on planet Earth, if we're lucky, if we maintain our foreign policy properly. ... It will be remembered as the last time major countries had to put people in the field and put them in harm's way. It may be the last of all human nature wars, which is a nice way to remember any kind of a war, as the last one.
My vision for this book and the others in the series is to let people know what kind of commanders we have. You don't pick generals off park benches. ... They are experts at what they do and lot of thinking goes into it. And I want to get across to people the intellectual dimension of command, to let people know that it's hard to be a general. And the people we have with general stars on their shoulders are pretty smart and pretty good guys.
There's two kinds of people in the world, the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.
People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots...
The more information a guy has, the more likely he is to say, "Hey, King Charlie, you really blew that call." That's why democracy happened. The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
Clancy's got a very simple view of the world. Good versus evil. Evil seems to get the upper hand. Good triumphs with vastly superior automatic weapons!
A field commander never has the information he needs. He has to go with his best hunch. The more information he has, the easier it is for him to win the battle.
Look, this is simple. The good old days are now. OK? The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.
That's the ultimate pornography... There's nothing more pornographic than glorifying war.
Fifteen years ago, there was this country called the Soviet Union that had over 10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us... they're not there anymore. That's a good thing. And when people talk about how the world is more dangerous now than it was because we had these terrorists running around, my reply is, you know, a terrorist is like a buzzing mosquito. About 15 years ago, there was a great, big vampire bat; that's several orders of magnitude different from a mosquito. So the world is much safer — a lot safer than it was. It's not perfectly safe, but it's a heck of a lot safer than it was.
The Soviet union is dead and gone and replaced by the Russian Federation, which is a country we can be friends with now, thank God — and we want the Russians to prosper, and should help the Russians prosper in every way we can within reason.
There are people in government who don't want other people to know what they know. It's just another example of elitism. And I spit on elitism. Show me an elitist, and I'll show you a loser.
Look, technology is another word for tool. There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. We got past that. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives.
The difference between me and you is that I do good fiction.