Nathaniel Hawthorne

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

I like villains because there's something so attractive about a committed person - they have a plan, an ideology, no matter how twisted. They're motivated.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

All of world's eyes are trained on the Games. So winning at that stage is heroic. It is a different feeling altogether and cannot be explained in words.