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" I read very little contemporary anything. "

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" I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything. "

" You write a lot of books; you hope you get better. "

" I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don't want to be the person to stick that in your brain. "

" You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic. "

" People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it. "

" Seattle's support system got me through those early, difficult years. It was a very funky, very friendly, very relaxed place that had it all for a writer. "

" If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they're all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They're disappointed, vengeful, angry. "

" Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy. "

" My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books. "

" I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past. "

" Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction. "

" Venice has always fascinated me. Every country in Europe then was run by kings and the Vatican except Venice, which was basically run by councils. I've always wondered why. "

" I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer. "

" I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript. "

" I invented the historical spy novel. "

" Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not. "

" I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator. "

" The best Paris I know now is in my head. "

" I just became what I call an 'anti-fascist novelist.' There is no word that covers both the fascists and the Communists, which mean different things to people, but of course they're the same: they're tyranny states. "

" If you can live in Paris, maybe you should. "

" I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer. "

" Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that? "

" I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place. "

" When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality. "