Author

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

The 1930s was a funny time. People knew they might not live for another six months, so if they were attracted to one another, there was no time to dawdle.

Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

If you're a writer, you're always working.

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.

Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.

The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.

I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.

I invented the historical spy novel.

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.

Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.

What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.