The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.

As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It's preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around.

We have a complicated intelligence relationship with France. We have a complicated intelligence relationship with other - with other allies.

Russia is emerging as an essential diplomatic and security partner for the U.S. in Syria, despite the Obama administration's opposition to Moscow's support for President Bashar al-Assad.

Moscow and Washington have evolved a delicate process for 'de-confliction' in the tight Syrian airspace, where accidents or miscommunication could be disastrous.

The Founding Fathers' instructions were clear: The right to free speech includes bad speech; it means tolerance of ideas that many find obnoxious.

We haven't usually had to face the extreme questions about liberty and order because we're not a nation of extremists. We love freedom and good government both.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, arguably President Obama's best Cabinet appointment, has been leading a quiet revolution in clean-energy technology. Innovation is transforming this industry, costs are plummeting and entrepreneurs are devising radical new systems that create American jobs - in addition to protecting the planet.

Politicians often call for sanctions as a way of sounding tough when they don't want to take riskier measures.

The European Union needs to reinvent its security system. It needs to break the stovepipes that prevent sharing information, enforcing borders and protecting citizens.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook is such a respected figure that it's easy to overlook the basic problem with his argument about encryption: Cook is asserting that a private company and the interests of its customers should prevail over the public's interest as expressed by our courts.

Training a reliable military force that adheres to Western norms and standards is the work of a generation, not a few months.

Paradoxically, the United States' determination to protect its troops can be self-defeating. Allies and adversaries see U.S. forces living in secure compounds, eating fancy chow and minimizing their exposure to potential terrorist assaults.

As Obama prepares to begin the last year of his presidency, he stands in an unusual position on the national stage: He is the rationalist, a creature of intellect rather than emotion.

American politics, like most things, is a story of what statisticians describe as the reversion to the mean.

Russia isn't likely to have any more military success in Syria and Iraq than has the United States.

The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi has become a political football in the presidential campaign, with all the grandstanding and misinformation that entails.

2011 is one of those years that historians are likely to look back on as a 'hinge.' And the truth, at once frightening and exhilarating, is that we don't know yet which way the door will swing.

Hedge-fund managers make too much money relative to their social utility. I wish their rewards were a bit closer to those of, say, schoolteachers.

A disaffected America can be drawn into a civilized - but disruptive - dialogue about political change and reformation.

If you want to hear arguments against deploying a big U.S. ground force in Syria, just ask a general.

My guess is that before Obama departs, he will adopt some of the more aggressive military options he has been resisting, such as 'safe zones' inside Syria and more aggressive deployment of U.S. special forces.

I'm as prone to 'declinism' as the next over-mortgaged middle-aged guy.

It's fashionable with the Sarah Palin set to attack Harvard and treat its graduates as elitists. But if you spend any time on campus, you see students drawn from all over the world - an astonishing number these days with roots in Asia - whose chief assets are brainpower and hard work.

This is a universal human dream - that brains, not brawn, will rule - and the fact that America has the world's finest institutions of higher education may be our greatest single national asset.

It's a genuine dilemma for governments, deciding how much information to share in this threat-filled era.

Real security will come when it's a moneymaker for private companies who want to satisfy public demand for an Internet that isn't crawling with bugs.

Foreign policy is about the execution of ideas as much as their formulation.

World War II provides a string of celebrated cases of deception and manipulation.

I have no interest in Twitter or Twotter or Twatter. It would never occur to me to use it. People who Tweet during programmes are always asking, 'What happened then?' If you're bloody Twittering away all the time, you miss what is actually going on.

While I'm hale and hearty, I've no thought in my mind to retire.

I was 25 when I'd told my parents that I was giving up steady work as an electrician to become an actor. They couldn't have been less enthusiastic if I'd proposed starting a commercial newt-breeding operation in the bathroom.

I never thought I was academically gifted at school. But when I started flying, I found you didn't need an academic mind - you just needed determination and dedication.

A couple of years ago, I bought my own helicopter, a Robinson R44. I use it occasionally to fly myself to sets where I am filming or to business meetings.

In this business, you have to have what they call an idiotic determination to succeed.

My mum, Olwen, was a bright and talkative woman who loved a gossip and a story and was given slightly to malapropisms. And she was Welsh, so, of course, she sang.

I will continue to entertain the great British public. Because that is what I love doing.

You wouldn't want me to play Frost in a wheelchair, would you? 'Frost' is getting a little long in the tooth. I still enjoy doing it, and it's a great part, but I just think he's got to retire.

I'm a twin, but only I emerged live from the womb. The fact that I was originally one half of a duo gave rise to a theory, much propounded in newspaper profiles, that my life has been one desperate effort to compensate for that stillborn brother.

Being an actor is like being a monk: you have got to be dedicated.

I grew up in London, a city devastated by the bombing. I am, you might say, a Blitz Baby.

Journalists are out to trap me with my underwear showing.

That's humour - doing what funny people have done since comedy began without being edgy and pushing boundaries.

It seems to me that as soon as politicians get in, they become part of this club, and the rest of us, beneath them, are just ants running about. They become besotted with their position.

I needed to be an actor more than anything.

I always say it is not the arrival; it is the journey.

I started at the Incognito Theatre as an amateur.

Comedy is a funny business, which you have to take seriously.

How do I feel about being called a national treasure? I think it's marvellous if that's people's opinion. But I'd rather have the money than the label.

My father, Arthur, was a fishmonger, first at Billingsgate market and later in Camden Town and Golders Green.