“My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.”

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.

I’m a genre writer.

I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

What someone else does or doesn’t do has no effect on me and what I do.

After getting out of the service and going into baseball I never wanted to do anything else.

I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.

Everything else is relative levels of hell.

When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.

I am in the fighting game. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t watch the news, I don’t care about politics,

The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.

[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it’s a place where you don’t have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It’s a place where you can still be an artisan.