“Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend all their time being bad. It is all they think about.”

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers.

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.

I invented the historical spy novel.

I’m not really a mass market writer.

I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

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

I read very little contemporary anything.

I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.

If you’re a writer, you’re always working.

I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don’t want to be the person to stick that in your brain.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.