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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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