Robert Littell > Quotes

“I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.”
― Robert Littell

“The difference between and amateur and a professional.. a professional believes if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. An amateur believes if a job is worth doing, it very well may be worth doing badly.”
― Robert Littell, The Amateur

“Life is short,” I told her. “The challenge is to make it sweet.”
― Robert Littell, A Nasty Piece of Work

“Should you start with a hypothesis and analyze data in a way that supported it, or start with the data and sift through it for a useful hypothesis?”
― Robert Littell, Legends

“If you are stupid enough to dine with the devil, for Christ’s sake use a long spoon.”
― Robert Littell, Legends

“It’s a mistake to possess comfortable things,” he said now. “Soft couches, big beds, large bath tubs, the like. Because if nothing is comfortable you don’t settle in; you keep moving. And if you keep moving, you have a better chance of staying ahead of the people who are trying to catch up with you.”
― Robert Littell, Legends

“Let there be light! said God, and there was light! Let there be blood! says man, and there’s a sea!”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“To the success of our hopeless cause”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“If you want to keep a big secret, disguise it as a boring and inconsequential secret rather then try to convince people it is not a secret at all.”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“People kill for tenure at Steklov. How can you abandon it like that?'

'Everyone in Russia has tenure,' Lemuel observed crabbily. 'The problem is they have tenure in Russia.”
― Robert Littell, The Visiting Professor

“Broke the ice with, “Don’t you think it curious that men shake hands with the same hand they use to wipe their arses?”
― Robert Littell, Young Philby

“Espionage is an effort to find windows into men’s souls.”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“I was born in Leningrad, but I came here from Saint Petersburg. Physically, the two occupy the same space. Emotionally, they are light years apart.”
― Robert Littell, The Visiting Professor

“Rowing,” Skip Waltz shouted over the din of the New Haven railroad station, “is a great training ground for real life in the sense that you’re taking something that is essentially very simple and perfecting it.” “In”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“In Russia we have a proverb--it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”
― Robert Littell, The Visiting Professor

“Cole was meticulous to a fault; office scuttlebut had it that he never went out in public without first having his shoelaces ironed.”
― Robert Littell, The Amateur

“The conversation had gotten off on the wrong foot and she knew it.”
― Robert Littell, A Nasty Piece of Work

“How he ached to stop looking over his shoulder every time he stepped into a street; to put the quest for Samat behind him and go back to boring himself to death, a pastime his sometime Chinese girlfriend, Minh, had once described as suicide in slow motion.”
― Robert Littell, Legends: A Novel

“I don't know what it was like back in Russia, Mr. Falk, but our undergraduates come to college to party and smoke dope and, excuse the expression, screw around. It's bad enough we interrupt this orgy with classes. Let's not lose our heads and insist the students stay awake in them.”
― Robert Littell, The Visiting Professor

“and he was too dense—and, in recent months, too drunk—to follow Mother into what T.S. Eliot had called, in his poem “Gerontion,” “the wilderness of mirrors.”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“exfiltrate”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“We need to take our cue from the drug dealers in Hoboken who, when they reach twenty, go to the local undertaker and prepay their funeral because they don’t expect to live to thirty.”
― Robert Littell, A Nasty Piece of Work

“He was a curious man who nourished himself with words; he was like a drug addict getting his daily fix. At the same time, he was aware of the dangers of words. He often said that speech organized behavior, and not the other way around. He thought clichés were wilted, tired poems. He complained that the world had been over-described; that often what we saw was the description, not the reality.”
― Robert Littell, The Amateur

“Infinity is something like the horizon seen from a ship - no matter how much you advance towards it, it is always beyond your reach. Trying to calculate pi is a going without a getting there.”
― Robert Littell, The Visiting Professor

“True genius, Churchill taught us, resides in the capacity to evaluate conflicting information.”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“Everything, as Mr. Yul Brynner used to tell us six nights a week and Saturday matinees, is a puzzlement.”
― Robert Littell, A Nasty Piece of Work

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened”),”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.”
― Robert Littell

“It is a great mistake to reduce your enemy to a demon,” Starik said. “It leaves you at a distinct disadvantage when you are attempting to outwit him.”
― Robert Littell, The Company

“A coincidence was like a matador’s red cape; if you spotted one, your instinct told you to do more than stand there and paw at the ground in frustration.”
― Robert Littell, The Company