There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

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

Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

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.