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" Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. "

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I've watched movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with. "

" 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. "

" Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I happen to write by hand. I don't even type. "

" But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. "

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

" I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies. "

" America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "