Live today, for tomorrow we die.

I invented the historical spy novel.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.

I'm not really a mass market writer.

I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.

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

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.