Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby. "

Related Quotes:

" I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering. "

" History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. "

" For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict. "

" 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. "

" A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it. "

" By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way. "

" Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie. "

" I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media. "

" I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man. "

" I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes. "

" The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story. "

" I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity. "

" It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely. "

" In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building. "

" Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it. "

" In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them. "

" The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London. "

" There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction. "

" We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another. "

" If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back. "

" More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature. "

" I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making. "

" Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book. "

" Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love. "

" You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty. "

" A committee is an animal with four back legs. "

" I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit. "

" Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do. "

" If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing. "

" It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret. "