America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

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.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

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

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them.

I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

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.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

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

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.

Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.

In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.

I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another.

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.

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

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

Betrayal can only happen if you love.

During the Cold War we lived in coded times when it wasnt easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

Coming home from very lonely places all of us go a little mad whether from great personal success or just an all night drive we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers and protects its weak.

Once youve lived the inside out world of espionage you never shed it. Its a mentality a double standard of existence.

The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

The only reward for love is the experience of loving.

Survival ... is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

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.

They did this to me but I have remained who I am. I am tempered. I am able. Inside myself there's an untouched man. If they came back now, and did everything to me again, they would never reach the untouched man. I've passed the exam I've been shirking all my life. I'm a graduate of pain.

An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone.