My perfect reader doesn't just read - he or she devours books.

The birds fly in the wrong places and there are too many stars in the sky.

Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.

Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.

You couldn't trust anyone or anything that belonged to the world of espionage.

In the old days, spies had done they'd done because they loved their country, because they believed in what they were doing. But he'd never been given a choice. Nowadays, spies weren't employed. They were used.

You don't need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller - as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.