“Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.”

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.

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were–Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.

My mother told me once that we can’t survive alone, but even if we could, we wouldn’t want to.

A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.

Don’t knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while.

I once tried standing up on my toes to see far out in the distance, but I found that I could see much farther by climbing to a high place.

I have imbibed such a love for money that I keep some sequins in a drawer to count, and cry over them once a week.

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

What happens is once you start to understand football, you realise that it’s not just about the physical side of the game and chasing after a ball. It’s a strategic sport which requires a lot of intelligence. It’s a very mental game.