When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

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

I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.