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.

I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

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

I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name.

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

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

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was.

It is my writing dilemma. The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

When I was 16 or 17, anyone could have had me if they sang the right song and recruited me in the right way. Which is why I've always had a sneaking understanding for people who took the wrong route. That doesn't mean to say I took it or even contemplated it myself.

In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.

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

I write and walk and swim and drink.

The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

You should have died when I killed you.

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.

I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I've watched movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

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.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.

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.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

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

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

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.

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

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

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.

To give the best of the day to your work is most important.

I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

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

Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within.