More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.