It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

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.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. Fifty years on, I don't associate the book with anything that ever happened to me, save for one wordless encounter at London airport when a worn-out, middle-aged military kind of man in a stained raincoat slammed a handful of mixed foreign change on to the bar and in gritty Irish accents ordered himself as much Scotch as it would buy. In that moment, Alec Leamas was born. Or so my memory, not always a reliable informant, tells me.

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.

I move my lips when I read -- I'm painfully slow -- so I like really good English.