Author

For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.

When I went to prep school in New York City, I had to ride the subway and learned how to do homework on the train. I can work and read through anything.

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.

I don't work Sunday any more... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.

I look for the dark story, where something secret was done. I read and read and pick up the trail of a true story. I use nothing but true stories. They are so much better than phony ones.

If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.

I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.

I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes.

Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.

My grandmother, whom I adored, and who partly raised me, loved Liberace, and she watched Liberace every afternoon, and when she watched Liberace, she'd get dressed up and put on makeup because I think she thought if she could see Liberace, Liberace could see her.

I read very little contemporary anything.

I like to say I sit alone in my room, and I fight the language. I am wildly obsessive. I can't let something go if I think it's wrong.

I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.

I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.

I figured I would always be a candidate for man of the year in the virtue-is-its-own-reward category. What that did was force me to concentrate on the work.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.