You can’t make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It’s a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done.
When you’re my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you’re seeing the show come round again.
For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.
To possess another language is to possess another soul.
A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.
Without a pen in my hand I can’t think.
I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?
Blackmail is more effective than bribery.
I happen to write by hand. I don’t even type.
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
I’ve never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.
It’s easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it’s not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
All men are born free: just not for long.
I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British.
Let’s die of it before we’re too old.