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I feel really lucky that I grew up pretending to be a spy for my whole childhood.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.

I think I would have been a hopeless spy. I love telling stories and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret.

I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy.

Several paranoid suspicions occurred to me, the worst of which was that my whole identity was merely a patched-together set of behaviors designed to keep my parents joined to each other - the repertoire of tricks of a small but intelligent dog.

I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.