There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

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.

It's not what you know

Cleanliness is a good thing, which the society should embrace. But it has nothing to do with Modi, nor can he implement it.

Denn die Todten reiten Schnell. (For the dead travel fast.)

I've lectured at the Harvard Business School several times.

My love life is like everyone else's - great, and then terrible.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

I'm interested in longevity, timelessness, style - not fashion.

The Democrats were in the majority in the U.S. Senate when we voted for the Iraq war and passed the U.S. Patriot Act. It's not enough to be in the majority, you have to stand for something.

When we have gone beyond the boundaries of hope and fear, we are able to work with whatever comes our way.

Seldom can philosophic genius be more usefully employed than in thus rescuing admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.