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

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" 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 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. "

" I write and walk and swim and drink. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it. "

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

" 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. "

" 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've always had difficulties with female characters. "

" 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. "

" Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead. "

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