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.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

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.

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

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.