Author

A world in which there are no secrets that can be protected at all is going to be a pretty dangerous world.

If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.

From David Ignatius

The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction.

From David Ignatius

The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be.

From David Ignatius

The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.

From David Ignatius

Sometimes James Bond movies drive me crazy. They're fun to watch, but they don't have anything to do at all with what intelligence officers really do.

From David Ignatius

I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.

From David Ignatius

As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It's preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around.

From David Ignatius

This experience of getting so lost in my writing that I lose track of time, or of anything outside the imagined world, is a release for me.

From David Ignatius

Empty political space will be filled by extremists unless the United States and its allies build strong local forces that can suppress terrorist groups and warlords both. When the U.S. creates such local forces, it must be persistent. If it withdraws from these efforts, as America did in Iraq in 2011, it invites mayhem.

From David Ignatius

David Ignatius

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