The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
The best thing about being a best-selling writer is being a best-selling writer. More seriously, today I can write full time and pay the bills.
If the question is, 'Do I wish I made thirty million dollars a year,' the answer is, 'You bet.' If the question is, 'Do I wish I could write like Tom Clancy,' the answer must remain, 'No.'
I've been really fortunate in that I guess I was hired to do 'A Cook's Tour;' I was already a known quantity, meaning I had written a really obnoxious book and nobody expected me to be anyone that I wasn't already.
When 'If God Was a Banker' became a success, it changed my entire perspective. I wanted to write more and wanted to be lot more successful as a writer.
She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.
Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.
When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.
I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them.
My daughter has seen the transition from struggling screenwriter to successful picture book author, and she's enjoyed it very much because she's a wonderful little kid. And she's always believed in her daddy.
I want to write a best-selling book.
I've had over a dozen and a half novels published since late 1994 when my first novel, 'Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls' came out.
Before, it was always, 'Oh, no, here comes Clancy, that insurance agent.' Now it's, 'Oh, here comes Tom Clancy, bestselling author.' But I'm still the same basic middle-class slob.
