I move my lips when I read -- I'm painfully slow -- so I like really good English.

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

Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

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

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.