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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety. "

" 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. "

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

" There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff. "

" 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. "

" But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state. "

" I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year. "

" It is my writing dilemma. 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 worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" You should have died when I killed you. "

" 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. "

" I write and walk and swim and drink. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. "

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