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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I write and walk and swim and drink. "

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

" When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was. "

" Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" You should have died when I killed you. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "