A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.

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

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.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.