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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

You should have died when I killed you.

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

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 write and walk and swim and drink.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.