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

Look... we're getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war. But now your own side is going to shoot you. Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?

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

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.

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

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.

It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.