I've always been a news junkie.

I started up this program here in Bermuda, working with what society deems under-privileged kids, at-risk kids.

Look what we did with Cuba. You isolate a country, and all you do is impoverish that country.

I'm happy about the fact that I got to do what I wanted to do since I was a kid. The fact that I got to live the dream that I wanted to live.

Guys do dives because they don't know how to work. Guys do flips because they don't know how to work.

I enjoyed the Bradshaw character - the beer-drinking character from Texas. It was just fun.

I should be a poster child for CTE.

I've been to over 70 different countries, all seven continents. It's been just a wonderful ride, and all that is because of professional wrestling 100%.

I retired because I had to, not because I wanted to. The temptation to get back in the ring is very much there.

I just don't think our best are in politics. I think these guys are inept.

My back's not great, and I can't wrestle a full schedule.

I really enjoyed working with Michael Cole. I think he's a great play-by-play guy.

My dad was a banker, and I've always had an interest in it.

I buy companies I want to own. I buy companies that make a lot of money, that don't have a lot of debt, and that I can understand.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

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

The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

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.

I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media.

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

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.

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.

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.

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.

If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year.

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.

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

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.

The merit of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' then - or its offence, depending where you stood - was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.

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.

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

There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff.

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.

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.

I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.

I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.

Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies.

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.