American novelist (1960- )
He thanked God for allowing him to live. So many hours of swimming, and then being picked up by the boat. In the vastness of the Gulf, what were the odds of that without divine intervention? The sharks had also miraculously left him alone. He had to attribute that to his prayers as well.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Forgotten
There's no greater chaos than when swift, violent death knocks on the door of an unsuspecting crowd.
DAVID BALDACCI
Split Second
I guess, at least consciously I was always wanting to do stories, when I was a kid. I loved telling stories orally, then I started writing them down in a little blank page-book my mom bought me when I was in elementary school. And I just loved writing stuff down and coming up with these big yarns. I never thought about having a career as a writer back then, but once I got into high school and college I started focusing on writing short stories. I loved reading short stories in high school and college, and I liked writing them. I wrote a dozen or so over the course of a number of years. And at that point, tried to get published. There’s very little market for short stories in the United States any more.
DAVID BALDACCI
interview, The Strand
That's what civilization sometimes did to threats, real or perceived. They walled them off. Us against them. Survival of the fittest. You die so I can live.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
Shortly before he died, Tom's father had asked his son to finish something that, according to legend, Twain never had. As his father told it, Mark Twain, who probably traveled more than any man of his time, during the latter part of his life, his so-called dark years. Apparently he'd wanted to see some good in the world amid all the tragedy he and his family had suffered. He'd supposedly taken extensive notes about the trip but for some reason had never distilled them into a story. That's What Tom's father had asked him to do: take the train ride, write the story, finish what Twain never had, and do the Langdon side of the family proud.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Christmas Train
He earned a national reputation managing large political campaigns, turning them into media-driven extravaganzas with emphasis on sound bites and perception over any kind of substance, and his win rate was astonishingly high. That probably said more for the gullibility of the modern voter than the high standards of the modern candidate.
DAVID BALDACCI
Split Second
Very few people knew I was writing during those years: my mom and dad, my brother and sister, my wife. That was it. Not even my in-laws knew. It was a very personal thing for me I was pursuing. My wife obviously was very instrumental. We had a family, and she took on more of the labor of that, allowing me to write at night, early in the morning, and on the weekends. My mom and dad obviously instilled the love of reading in all three of us siblings; we went to the library every weekend and checked out lots of books. But for my love of books, I wouldn’t have ended up being a writer. But I could open a book and explore different parts of the world without ever leaving the city where I grew up. It was a fascinating thing, and I became mesmerized by the power of language. That’s really what started it for me.
DAVID BALDACCI
interview, The Strand
I started writing screenplays, writing scripts for films. Got an agent in L.A., and actually had some producers interested in my work. I’d always wanted to write a novel, and an idea hit me in the early 90s about the president and the burglar and all of that. I spent three years writing at night while I was practicing law, and I thought it was a good story. I sent it out to agents, and my life changed. I think when I was in high school, trying to get short stories published, is when I first had this idea that maybe I could be a writer. But even back then I thought, this is only a hobby, a sideline; you’re gonna have to get a real job in life, and this is something you’ll do at night or early in the morning and maybe sell a story here and there and that’ll be pretty much your career.
DAVID BALDACCI
interview, The Strand
Lots of people don't talk about their military service.... A pretty accurate rule of thumb is the people who did the most talk about it the least. The blowhards are the ones who did squat.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
That was the problem with an eight-figure gorilla of a client. It took all of your time and attention. Old clients dried up and died away. New clients were not cultivated. His complacency had come back to bite him right in the ass.
DAVID BALDACCI
Absolute Power
Most folks here got rules 'bout trespassing. Warning shot's fired right close to the head. Get they's attention. Next shot gets a lot more personal.
DAVID BALDACCI
Wish You Well
It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realized. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Whole Truth
Woe be to the wug who forgets that destroying one part of a thing does not equal victory.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Finisher
Ignorance and intolerance to be like commas, because you often found them in pairs, and almost never did you find one, ignorance, without its evil twin, intolerance.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Camel Club
Things sometimes did not work out. Even if you wanted them to more than anything else. You couldn’t will someone to love you back. You had to move on.
DAVID BALDACCI
Absolute Power
The first person to see the video, a computer programmer in Houston, was stunned. He e-mailed the file to a list of twenty friends on his share list. The next person to view it seconds later lived in France and suffered from insomnia. In tears, she sent it to fifty friends. The third viewer was from South Africa and was so incensed at what he'd seen that he phoned the BBC and then did an e-mail blast to eight hundred of his "closest" mates on the Web. A teenage girl in Norway watched the video in horror and then forwarded it to every person she knew. The next thousand people to view it lived in nineteen different countries and shared it with thirty friends each, and they with dozens each. What had started as a digital raindrop in the Internet ocean quickly exploded int a pixel-and-byte tsunami the size of a continent.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Whole Truth
Five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress plied their trade near here in various buildings named after long-dead politicians. They, in turn, were surrounded by an army of lobbyists flush with cash who worked relentlessly to convince the elected officials of the unassailable righteousness of their causes. Such was democracy.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
Thanks for being honest about your dishonesty.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
It had always bothered Tom that women thought they could win an argument with a man simply by appealing to his baser instincts, by holding out the mere possibility of award-winning carnal knowledge. It was the gender equivalent of a preemptive nuclear strike. He thought it unfair and, quite frankly, disrespectful of the entire male population.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Christmas Train
King heard the bang, like the sound of a dropped book. He could feel the moisture on his hand where it had touched Ritter's back. And now the moisture wasn't just sweat. His hand stung where the slug had come out of the body and taken a chunk off his middle finger before hitting the wall behind him. As Ritter dropped, King felt like a comet flying hell-bent and still taking a billion light-years to get where it's actually going.
DAVID BALDACCI
Split Second