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

The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.

You should have died when I killed you.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another.

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.