Clive Cussler

I like snappy dialogue and short descriptions and lots of action.

If ever a car was created by designers with dreams of grandeur, it had to be the 1958 Buick Limited: the heftiest, highest-priced and most opulent monster ever to hit the street in the '50s.

I'd heard about a shipwreck that was never found - John Paul Jones' Bonhomme Richard. So I thought, 'Well, I'll go look for it.'

I suppose, because I've been able to make a very good living writing books, that going out and finding another million dollars under the sea is not the fascination. The fascination is in finding the ship.

NUMA is basically trying to preserve our maritime heritage by finding lost shipwrecks of historical significance before they are gone.

If you have some natural talent and really want to write, you should read the books of someone who's very successful in your genre. You don't want to plagiarize, but you want to learn from that author.

When I first started writing, I was in advertising at the time, I was doing most of my writing on weekends. I had studied most of the other series heroes and I figured it would be fun for mine to be different and put him in and around water. So I dreamed up Dirk Pitt.

I can appreciate other writers' works.

My forte is the plotting. You sit down, and you work out a plot.