I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself.

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge

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

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.