 A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it. |
| Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news. |
| When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt. |
| I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price. |
| Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book. |
| We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own. |
| Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. |
| I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention. |
| I happen to write by hand. I don't even type. |
| A committee is an animal with four back legs. |
| In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs. |
| The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat. Topics: Childhood |
| I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it. |
| I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself. |
| Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love. Topics: Love Is |
| You should have died when I killed you. |
| During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity. |
| There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction. |
| Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves. |
| I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives. |
