I could have stopped it after they paid me the $50,000. I wouldn't even have had to go on to do more than I already had: just the double agents' names that I gave.

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.

The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

There is a class system in acting just like in anything else. Black females fall in a category below black male actors.

The government is trying to now close the Lincoln Memorial for any kind of large gatherings.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed

At least let us have healthy books.

Are not all finite beings better pleased with motions relative than absolute?

I act here and there but you have to commit so far out in advance when you're directing that you - I'm kind of booked six months out, so it's hard.

In journalism, there are only two stories - "Oh, the wonder of it," and "Oh, the shame of it."

Frame your mind to mirth and merriment which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.