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

Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.

For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day.

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

No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.