The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

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.

God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.