Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.

Espionage, for the most part, involves finding a person who knows something or has something that you can induce them secretly to give to you. That almost always involves a betrayal of trust.

The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.

The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.

The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us.

Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with.

The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people.

The only thing I ever withheld from the KGB were the names of two agents whom I personally had known and handled and had a particular feeling for.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to present a finished product.

Funny how "question" contains the word "quest" inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars.

Since the human mind is the primary weapon of the human being, it is also therefore the primary and most significant instrument of violence.

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?

Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.

I'm attached to my land in Pantelleria as if I'd inherited it. Acting is my job, Pantelleria is my home.

We cannot transform what we refuse to engage

I don't particularly enjoy publicity, it seems to just follow me around.

They really don't know where the future lies. If developers decide to build a high-rise where the McCormick building is, they'd have nowhere to go.

The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also.

No matter where you're going it's the wrong place