I Used To Think It

I Grew Up In A Completely Bookless Household. It Was My Father's Boast That He Had Never Read A Book From End To End. I Don't Remember Any Of His Ladies Being Bookish. So I Was Entirely Dependent On My Schoolteachers For My Early Reading With The Exception Of The Wind In The Willows, Which A Stepmother Read To Me When I Was In Hospital.

God Is In His Heaven And The First Night Was A Wow.

I Think That Most Of My Books Are Part Of Some Process Of Self-education, Often About The Places I Go To. Most Of All, They Are About The Peculiar Tension Between Institutional Loyalty And Loyalty To Oneself; The Mystery Of Patriotism, For A Brit Of My Age And Generation, Where It Runs, How It Should Be Defined, What It's Worth And What A Corrupting Force It Can Be When Misapplied. All That Stuff Is Just In Me And It Comes Out In The Characters. I Don't Mean To Preach, But I Know I Do, And I'm A Very Flawed Person. It's Quite Ridiculous.

It's Part Of A Writer's Profession, As It's Part Of A Spy's Profession, To Prey On The Community To Which He's Attached, To Take Away Information - Often In Secret - And To Translate That Into Intelligence For His Masters, Whether It's His Readership Or His Spy Masters. And I Think That Both Professions Are Perhaps Rather Lonely.

Look... We're Getting To Be Old Men, And We've Spent Our Lives Looking For The Weaknesses In One Another's Systems. I Can See Through Eastern Values Just As You Can See Through Our Western Ones. Both Of Us, I Am Sure, Have Experienced Ad Nauseam The Technical Satisfactions Of This Wretched War. But Now Your Own Side Is Going To Shoot You. Don't You Think It's Time To Recognise That There Is As Little Worth On Your Side As There Is On Mine?