After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.

People are very secretive - secret even from themselves.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

When it comes to recruiting people for the secret world, what the recruiters are looking for is pretty much what I had. I was unanchored, looking for an institution to look after me. I had a bit of larceny. I understood larceny. I understood the natural criminality in people - because it was - it was all around me. And I have no doubt there was a chunk of it inside me too. Once I found that identity, it took root in me. It exactly - it gelled with the world that I'd known in the past.

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.