The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

• By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
• When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.
• I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.
• I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
• More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
• The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
• A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
• I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.
• You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
• I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.