Robert Littell Quotes

#1. I am not conventionally religious, but I am an ongoing student of the Old and the New Testament and the history of the Jewish people and the birth of Christianity.

Robert Littell

#2. The difference between and amateur and a professional.. a professional believes if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. An amateur believes if a job is worth doing, it very well may be worth doing badly.

Robert Littell

#3. If you are stupid enough to dine with the devil, for Christ's sake use a long spoon.

Robert Littell

#4. For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.

Robert Littell

#5. I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.

Robert Littell

#6. Should you start with a hypothesis and analyze data in a way that supported it, or start with the data and sift through it for a useful hypothesis?

Robert Littell

#7. When people ask me if I have worked for the C.I.A., I often answer: what good to you is my answer? Because if I did, I might not say so.

Robert Littell

#8. We need to take our cue from the drug dealers in Hoboken who, when they reach twenty, go to the local undertaker and prepay their funeral because they don't expect to live to thirty.

Robert Littell

#9. Life is short," I told her. "The challenge is to make it sweet.

Robert Littell

#10. I am an amateur mountain climber. Once or twice a year I go off to Chamonix in the French Alps, under Mont Blanc, and with a guide do treks that include rock climbing at high altitude.

Robert Littell

#11. Mark Twain said, 'The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug.' Fill your book with lightning.

Robert Littell

#12. Fill your pages with details. Work hard to get the right word.

Robert Littell

#13. It's a mistake to possess comfortable things," he said now. "Soft couches, big beds, large bath tubs, the like. Because if nothing is comfortable you don't settle in; you keep moving. And if you keep moving, you have a better chance of staying ahead of the people who are trying to catch up with you.

Robert Littell

#14. The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

Robert Littell

#15. To the success of our hopeless cause

Robert Littell

#16. Cole was meticulous to a fault; office scuttlebut had it that he never went out in public without first having his shoelaces ironed.

Robert Littell

#17. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

Robert Littell