Leon Uris

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

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.

They said I couldn't play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York.

I just hate sitting and writing - I had to do that in school. Plus, I have terrible handwriting.

I wanted to be a teacher, but I was a lousy student, one of the slowest readers. It was a tremendous struggle. But I'm lucky I had some teachers who saw something in me.