Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

When it comes to recruiting people for the secret world, what the recruiters are looking for is pretty much what I had. I was unanchored, looking for an institution to look after me. I had a bit of larceny. I understood larceny. I understood the natural criminality in people - because it was - it was all around me. And I have no doubt there was a chunk of it inside me too. Once I found that identity, it took root in me. It exactly - it gelled with the world that I'd known in the past.

Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.

I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.

Elections are a Western jerk-off.

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.