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.

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

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

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

I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.

I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.