Smiley Was Soaked To The Skin And

I Don't Think That There Are Very Many Good Writers Who Don't Live Without A Sense Of Tension. If They Haven't Got One Immediately Available To Them, Then They Usually Manage To Manufacture It In Their Private Lives.

I Think That All Writers Feel Alienated. ... I Know That I Do. ... I Still Feel, As I Think Most Creative People Do, Absolutely Isolated.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Was The Work Of A Wayward Imagination Brought To The End Of Its Tether By Political Disgust And Personal Confusion. Fifty Years On, I Don't Associate The Book With Anything That Ever Happened To Me, Save For One Wordless Encounter At London Airport When A Worn-out, Middle-aged Military Kind Of Man In A Stained Raincoat Slammed A Handful Of Mixed Foreign Change On To The Bar And In Gritty Irish Accents Ordered Himself As Much Scotch As It Would Buy. In That Moment, Alec Leamas Was Born. Or So My Memory, Not Always A Reliable Informant, Tells Me.

Yet It's Not For Want Of Future That I'm Here, He Thought. It's For Want Of A Present.

And The Ideologies Trailed After These Impossible Events Like Condemned Prisoners, As Ideologies Do When They've Had Their Day. Because They Have No Heart Of Their Own. They're The Whores And Angels Of Our Striving Selves.