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

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

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

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

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.