You change or you hide your head in the sand.

A reversal is just anything that's a surprise. It's a way of keeping the audience interested.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.

I love the idea of spies in love. How would it work between two people who were so programmed to lie and be suspicious, who have a whole life based on pretence?

You have to know human behaviour … And the quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You’ll never write above what you know about people.

The people in the Philippines are so extraordinarily nice.

No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.

Different people work different ways.

Fear changes everything. We're animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I'm not exempt from that.

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

so many people live and they only live and die

It is better to be deceived by one's friends than to deceive them.

I would eat healthy at times and pig out at times. But I never had to go on a strict diet plan.

I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

People who are isolated interest me, whether they isolate themselves or have been isolated by circumstances.

Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.

If courage wasn't a standard result of aging it meant that the young could somehow acquire it as well.

The lion cares less about being king of the beasts than about finding his dinner.

A doctrinaire is a fool but an honest man.