Nelson DeMille Quotes

I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.

I am a huge fan of Alan Furst. Furst is the best in the business--the most talented espionage novelist of our generation.

I didn't think that and I didn't verbalize that to myself or within meetings that we ever had, but we wanted to make a hard-nosed, gritty, realistic spy thriller. Roger talked about using lenses. He shot hi-def, but using anamorphic lenses that he'd found from this warehouse. He was so thrilled with that. Him and Romain [Lacourbas] were just like kids in a toy store with their lenses.

What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.

I think it was the sense that Turn is a spy thriller, and that's a genre that really fascinates me, in general.

That’s the thing about spies. Most of the secrets we keep are from each other.

Charles Kiss is a legendary James Bond-style British spy. And McGrath is the young idealist who is given the task of following in his footsteps. It's a mission that forces McGrath to question everything he thought he believed in.

Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.

When I think of a story, somehow it just always seems to come out involving spooks and spies and government skullduggery.

I've always had a great affection for espionage stories. I like weaving them, and I like thrillers.

I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.

I invented the historical spy novel.

Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.

Obviously, anyone who has seen Mr. and Mrs. Smith knows that husband and wife married spies is something that I find particularly interesting.

He [John Le Carré] really paid tribute to the people who are willing to risk their own lives to fight injustice - they are greater men and women than I.

Of all those in the army close to the commander, none is more intimate than the secret agent.

When you're dealing with espionage and covert affairs, sometimes the secret is more exciting than the knowledge.

They [spies] cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness.

It's very, very difficult I think for us to have a transparent debate about secret programs approved by a secret court issuing secret court orders based on secret interpretations of the law.

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies... That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

Everybody thinks it's glamorous and this spy versus spy stuff is so exciting, but working in that industry and being a CIA operative, like a field officer, is tough. That's a difficult job that usually dismantles their lives in some capacity.

In the old days, spies had done they'd done because they loved their country, because they believed in what they were doing. But he'd never been given a choice. Nowadays, spies weren't employed. They were used.

I'm a spy. It's not really... I worked for the CIA 15 years. The cover was I worked for the insurance business.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.