Quotes by Richard M. Helms

I have one president at a time. I only work for you.

As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I'm in this for the long haul.

I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it.

I just couldn't finish anything. I wrote a lot of first chapters, but the desire to push it through to completion just wasn't there. Instead, I focused on the other parts of my life. Elaine and I had two children, I was racing a lot, and I was working on becoming a good forensic psychologist.

I've always believed that good writing comes from experience. I have been approached by a number of younger students, people in their twenties, who have asked 'Where do you get your ideas?'. Of course, ideas are all around us - in the morning paper, the weekly news, even overheard in crowded restaurants, courtrooms, and sports arenas. When you write stories about the human experience of crime, there is no shortage of material in the things people do every day.

It was exciting and it featured a romantic antagonist, an offbeat protagonist, and a whopper of an ending.

It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.

The real problem is arranging that experience in a way that tells a story, which is just incredible enough to be interesting, but credible enough to be believed.

The simple things, like how to hang a sentence together, how to write dialogue that keeps the story moving - all of these had to be learned. In addition, it was during these years that I was growing a life from which I could derive the basic ingredients of a good story. Without the experiences I was stockpiling during those years, it would not have been possible to produce the next two or three books.

Yes we have a specific procedure which we follow in all cases where the Agency is in contact, for the purposes of acquiring intelligence or whatever the case may be, with an individual.

This also turned out to be negative, so there is no material in the Central Intelligence Agency, either in the records or in the mind of any of the individuals, that there was any contact had or even contemplated with him.