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" During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity. "

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

" I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know. "

" Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West. "

" I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention. "

" People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others. "

" Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within. "

" Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic. "

" SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel. "

" Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader. "

" The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days. "

" The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received. "

" To give the best of the day to your work is most important. "

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

" 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. "

" Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. "

" 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. "

" A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. "

" 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. "

" I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them. "

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

" I've always had difficulties with female characters. "

" The merit of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' then - or its offence, depending where you stood - was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. "

" 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. "

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

" I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself. "

" 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. "