But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

Let's die of it before we're too old.

There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

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

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

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