In 1948 I addressed some students at Washington and Lee University, and in the question-answer period one young man observed with asperity, "But it's easy for you to write. You've traveled."

I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.

A group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.

On a bleak wintry morning some years ago I was summoned to the office of our naval attache at the American embassy in Kabul.

On Tuesday the freighter steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar and for five days plowed eastward through the Mediterranean, past islands and peninsulas rich in history, so that on Saturday night the steward advised Dr. Cullinane, "If you wish an early sight of the Holy Land you must be up at dawn."

Youth is truth.

Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door.

For some time now they had been suspicious of him.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa.