Love Means Having Something To Betray.

The Trouble Is, When Professional Spies Go Out Of Their Way To Make A Definitive Statement About One Of Their Own, The Public Tends To Believe The Opposite: Which Puts Us All Back Where We Started.

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.

It's Easy To Forget What Intelligence Consists Of: Luck And Speculation. Here And There A Windfall, Here And There A Scoop.

I Think That Most Of My Books Are Part Of Some Process Of Self-education, Often About The Places I Go To. Most Of All, They Are About The Peculiar Tension Between Institutional Loyalty And Loyalty To Oneself; The Mystery Of Patriotism, For A Brit Of My Age And Generation, Where It Runs, How It Should Be Defined, What It's Worth And What A Corrupting Force It Can Be When Misapplied. All That Stuff Is Just In Me And It Comes Out In The Characters. I Don't Mean To Preach, But I Know I Do, And I'm A Very Flawed Person. It's Quite Ridiculous.

I Worked For Mi6 In The Sixties, During The Great Witch-hunts, When The Shared Paranoia Of The Cold War Gripped The Services.