American novelist (1960- )
It's my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they're going. For them it's the journey itself and the people they meet along the way. You see, at every stop this train makes, a little bit of America, a little bit of your country, gets on and says hello.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Christmas Train
Sometimes inspiration hits in the middle of the night and I want to get up and work on it. It’s that spark of immediacy. For me, it’s a tap which is on all the time.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Telegraph, November 16, 2015
After all, there were bills to pay, shopping to do, kids to raise, and sports to watch, so who had time for anything else?
DAVID BALDACCI
The Whole Truth
For once in a long time, he felt good. No worries, just possibilities. Endless possibilities.
DAVID BALDACCI
Absolute Power
I was with Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. I was a rookie cop in L.A. when RFK came through. I just stood there and watched a man who should have gone on to be president bleed to death on the floor. Every day since then I've wondered what I could have done differently.
DAVID BALDACCI
Split Second
Life is what it is, Will. You take it as it comes.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
Like a spreading pandemic, the video ignited a maelstrom worldwide. From blog to blog, chat room to chat room, e-mail to e-mail, the story passed. With each retelling it grew in proportion until the globe was in apparent jeopardy of being overrun at any moment by crazy, bloodthirsty Russians. Within three days after Konstantin's sad proclamation, the world rang with his name. Soon half the earth's population, including many who had no idea who the U.S. president or the pope was, knew all about the dead Russian.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Whole Truth
People with power and means would always take advantage of those without them.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Forgotten
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
God made all of us, Josh. We all his children. Ain't no good trying to divide us all up. I seen plenty of white folk beaten up in prison. Evil comes in all forms, all colors. Bible says so. I ain't judging nobody except on themselves. Only way to do it.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Simple Truth
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
She noticed a shadow of movement behind her, but had no chance to feel alarmed about it. That was Betsy Puller Simon's last memory.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Forgotten
At this prison the doors are inches thick, steel; once factory smooth, they now carry multiple dents. Imprints of human faces, knees, elbows, teeth, residue of blood are harvested large on their gray surface. Prison hieroglyphics: pain, fear, death, all permanently recorded here, at least until a new slab of metal arrives.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Simple Truth
He was accustomed to seeing without benefit of light, becoming, over the years, an expert of sorts. The years in prison had also boosted the acuity of his hearing such that he could almost hear someone thinking. You did both a lot in prison: listening and thinking.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Simple Truth
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
They were not rich. They were not powerful. They were truly the forgotten.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Forgotten
Listening to a sermonizer who above all loves to hear himself sermonize is about as much fun as having your toes sheared off.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Finisher
There's no greater chaos than when swift, violent death knocks on the door of an unsuspecting crowd.
DAVID BALDACCI
Split Second
I love my country. It is a place of beauty. The people there are good. They like to work hard. They love their freedoms. But that does not mean that every leader we have is a good one who deserves the respect of the people. So sometimes when you do not follow along blindly things happen to you.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Forgotten
I figure if you think too much about things, life sometimes just passes you by.
DAVID BALDACCI
Split Second