Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended..

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying.

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should..

I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated..

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books..

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them..

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 t….

Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what….

You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic..

Good people don't spend their time being good. Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend al….

Live today, for tomorrow we die..

If you're a writer, you're always working..

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything..

I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are….

The best Paris I know now is in my head..

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be..

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don'….

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer..

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that….

I invented the historical spy novel..

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer..