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

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

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.

I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.