Matthew Rhys Quotes

I really wanted to be a spy. I guess it's a bit like acting, where you play a role.

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

I've always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.

Spies go undercover. They take on different personas.

Oh, I can keep many secrets, so I would be a phenomenal secret agent. I love secrets.

I spent a whole career infiltrating places.

I love the spy genre.

I'd be a terrible secret agent. I can't keep a secret and I'm not sneaky.

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.

I would have loved to have met some former spies, but they don't readily advertise themselves unless they're not living in Moscow, and even then. I'm sure I've met some without realizing it.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

This town leaks like a sieve. Sometimes I think that the easiest thing on the world would be to be a spy against the United States of America

Intelligence is about lies. If something is legal and above board, you would not need the CIA to do it.

You can probably forgive the top spy for lying about spying. Lying is part of the job description. It’s what spies do.

Hollywood does tend to portray CIA officers as totally the honey trap. Looks matter as they do in any profession. But the most important thing for me when I was working was blending into my environment.

You can't be a real spy and have everybody in the world know who you are and what your drink is. That's just hysterically funny.

For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence.

If I was a spy, I would have a watch that would cloak me in invisibility.

Exposing the activities of a foreign intelligence service renders them ineffective, since it removes plausible deniability, which is the hallmark of covert intelligence operations.

The life of spies is to know, not bee known.

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

You couldn't trust anyone or anything that belonged to the world of espionage.

Betrayal, in one form or another, is at the very heart of the world of intelligence.