Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

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

The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.