Author

I just became what I call an 'anti-fascist novelist.' There is no word that covers both the fascists and the Communists, which mean different things to people, but of course they're the same: they're tyranny states.

I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.

I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.

I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.

My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion.

Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.

Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.

I read very little contemporary anything... I don't think I read what other people read, but then why would I, considering what I do?

You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.

I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.

For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.

I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative - completely based on 'The Conversation,' the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like... Gene Hackman.

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

The idea that someone is going to write me, and I'm not going to answer - I was just raised not to do that. We are the result of our upbringing, and my upbringing was very much to meet obligations... You just didn't let things go.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.