novelist, screenwriter, film producer, actor, spy, writer
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1931 – 2020
It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
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, in every confrontation that has come my way, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
Every writer wants to be believed. But every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
He worked for the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else would have entertained in his woodshed.
Blackmail is more effective than bribery.
So odd to think of the Devil as a fumbler!
The neglected are too easily killed.
Balls, the lot of it. It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
You see a lot — your eyes get very painful.
There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.
[She] reports that [the company] recently donated fifty million dollars to a major U.S. teaching hospital, plus salaries and expenses for three top clinicians and six research assistants. Corruption of university Common Room affiliations is even easier: professorial chairs, biotech labs, research foundations, etc. 'Unbought scientific opinion is increasingly hard to find.'
Savages...are by nature rash. They have no middle gear. The middle gear of any man is self-discipline.
Luck's just another word for destiny...either you make your own or you're screwed.
If you're in a hole, don't dig, they say.
When you assimilate, you choose.
Elections are a Western jerk-off.
Why is it that so many men of small stature have more courage than men of size?
Peace, gentlemen, it is well known, does not come of its own accord, and neither does freedom. Peace has enemies. Peace must be won by the sword.
The friends of my friends are my friends.
Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.
We were both hybrids: I by birth, he by education. We had both taken too many steps away from the country that had borne us to belong anywhere with ease.
No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.
A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.
Nothing in life... even a few broken bones, is without its reward.
There are some Arabs who think that the Germans did the right thing by the Jews. This makes it easy to recruit Arab terrorist.
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
We were not faced (in the cold war) in a conflict with people who are prepared to die for their cause. We weren't in conflict with people whose idea is to kill as many as they could.
In the war on terror we did everything wrong that we could have done.
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.
To operate an intelligence network against the Islamist terror is terribly difficult because they don't have a central command and control center such as we would understand. Therefore you cannot penetrate at the top and find out what will happen on the ground.
Because we are so unfamiliar with the motivation of the people we are dealing with, we are more afraid of them than we need to be.
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.
The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.
SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.
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.