In battle, you forgive a man anything except an unwillingness to take risks. Sometimes you have to put it on the line.

The most wounding insult to an educated Russian was to be called nekulturny-uncultured-yet the same men who sat in the gilt boxes at the Moscow State Opera weeping at the end of a performance of Boris Gudunov could immediately turn around and order the execution or imprisonment of a hundred men without blinking. A strange people, made more strange by their political philosophy.

The difference between me and you is that I do good fiction.

I was one of the first generations to watch television. TV exposes people to news, to information, to knowledge, to entertainment. How is it bad?

It is a principle of diplomacy that one must know something of the truth in order to lie convincingly.

Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.