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

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.

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.

Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.

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

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.