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

Good people don’t spend their time being good.

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.

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

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

To know how to hide one’s ability is great skill.

The guy who could be me, but he knows when to draw the line, is John Cena. John Cena can rock ‘n’ roll, let me tell you.

All I know how to do is take what’s on my mind and spit it out funny. I don’t know what else I could do besides comedy.

Somebody the other day had a review, called me ‘America’s reprobate.’ And I don’t even know what that means, but I kinda like the way it sounds.

I have Gordon Ramsay to thank for my TV career because Channel 4 spent a long time trying to find him a sidekick for ‘The F Word’, then he suggested me, knowing I’d stand up to him.

Everybody I know is a joke writer.

Let us never know what old age is. Let us know the happiness time brings, not count the years.