I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

I can't think of anybody worse to live with.

Home's where you go when you run out of homes.

Life was to be a search, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. Every encounter was an encounter with myself.