Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I’m dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam’s downfall – just not on Bush’s terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go.
Never trade a secret, you’ll always get the short end of the bargain.
Life was to be a search, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. Every encounter was an encounter with myself.
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world’s sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.
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.
On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution.
Love means having something to betray.
I don’t know whether it’s age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.
Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.
The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It’s just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.
There’s one thing worse than change and that’s the status quo.
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven’t made is to talk about the unwritten book.
I’ve got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I’d give this one a twang.
I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.
What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.
It’s a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.