What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

Home's where you go when you run out of homes.

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.

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

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

I can't think of anybody worse to live with.