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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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

" You should have died when I killed you. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within. "

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

" I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services. "

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

" 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. "

" We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own. "

" I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name. "

" 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. "

" I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man. "

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

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

" I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price. "

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

" 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. "

" If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level. "

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

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

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