“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.”

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.

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.

I always loved music, and I always wanted to make a film about it, but I could never do it because of the censorship that was around.

There should be no censorship of mail.

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

It seems now that the place where you see the most obvious censorship is on college campuses.

The [China] government has improved in the last years. Of course, the structure is still the same; there’s still a one-party system and strong censorship.

Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.