Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

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

Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.

The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.

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

No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.