“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.

the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said

There’s a lot of good talent and the audience base is bigger.

It’s basically how I choose movie roles. Would I like to see this movie? Is this movie important? Why would I do this? And Headhunters is a movie that I would like to see in the cinema.

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.

We’ve never written a song and thought ‘oh it’d be great if in this part this happened in the audience’.

We don’t play to be seen. I’m addicted to music, not audiences.

In the South, it is different, they have a audience that is literate.

As far as I know, if you take your time, write a good script and make a good film, then give the audience time, they will accept it.

One thing we do really well on Archer and one thing I’ve always tried to do in my comedy and my writing and my podcast is to never speak down to my audience.