“I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.”

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 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.

For me acting, comes straight from the heart. In that sense I don’t act at all. I think that to feel the character’s pain I have to be myself. Somewhere audiences see that.

I think if you’re talented and not desperate to do any film that comes your way, and are doing justice to all your roles, then you’re fine, because you can’t predict the rest. You also can’t predict the audience’s reaction.

There are people who want awards because it changes the perception of the audience. But I’m not into all that.

If you don’t come from film family, it takes time for people to register you. When you don’t come from film family, the connection with the audience takes time to build up; it happens eventually.

Fame is directly related to the kind of support you have from an audience and the love and support I have from audience is so immense and so huge, that the percentage of negativity is so small compared to that that it would be very easy for it to lose itself.

There are two kinds of films: the ones that are devoid of logic but can still hijack the audience, and those that can win them over with logic. Both kinds can succeed, and I like to work in both.

I have always maintained that the audience should take a call on this. Its up to them to decide whether they want to see a pirated version or not. They should understand the effort and amount of hard work that go into a film.

When I listen to a basic thought, I try to visualise the cinema in it. Sometimes it is dark, sometimes boyish, sometimes amateurish. It is a trial and error method. But the bottom line is that I want to entertain the audience.