LEON URIS

Often we have no time for our friends but all the time in the world for our enemies.

It is extremely important to know what you don't want to find.

You can try to reach an audience, but you just write what comes out of you and you just hope that it is accepted. You do not write specifically to a generation.

I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.

My first book was rejected nine times. It turned out to be a best seller, Battle Cry? in 1953.

So writing is a very, very difficult position to obtain... and retain.

Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.

I was too heavy to be a jockey and too honest to be a producer, so I became a writer.

I was a terrible English student.

Usually a good part of the people trying it end up not making it.

I am very proud of this work because it is more about the meaning of the Easter Rising and its relationship to what this whole century has been about, people liberating themselves, freeing themselves.

I have drawn inspiration from the Marine Corps, the Jewish struggle in Palestine and Israel, and the Irish.

I essentially write for myself.

I do not write for an audience.

I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.

Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people and that is what you write about.

English of course is your major tool, but it is not nearly so important as other aspects of writing for example you have to have some natural ability you can't buy it no one puts it there you're born with it.

Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world and all of us against the infidel.

Pride is a fool's fortress

In order to be a good writer, you've got to be a bad boss. Self-discipline and stamina are the two major arms in a writer's arsenal.

A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

Who is left in the ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of force within his soul will stand in defiance against any master. He is that one human in a thousand whose indomitable spirit will not bow. He is the one man in a thousand whose indomitable spirit cannot bow. He is the one man in a thousand who will not walk quietly to Umschlagplatz. Watch out for him, Alfred Funk, we have pushed him to the wall.

To me, a writer is one of the most important soldiers in the fight for survival of the human race. He must stay at his post in the thick of fire to serve the cause of mankind.

A soldier has one item that cannot be neglected. His feet. They are his wheels, his mechanised warfare.

On one occasion I went to Afghanistan to look at the borders and learn something about the situation there to see if my book was there?and it wasnt.