When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

The only reward for love is the experience of loving.

Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.

I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.

Blackmail is more effective than bribery.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

Its a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.

Chess is a game of bad moves.

The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

if you want to keep happiness , you have to share it !

In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad intellectual conscience was at least exposed by that!

When you don't go within, you go without.

I do not fear invisible worlds.

No relief was forthcoming from my then-Catholic faith, which said the practice of homosexuality was a 'mortal sin' subject to damnation.

Present joys are more to flesh and blood Than a dull prospect of a distant good.

We all fail. But none of us fail all the time.