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.

By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.

People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.

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.