Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes

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

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

In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well.

It was awesome and liberating to play a Russian spy.

It's a very dangerous and lonely thing, I imagine, to be a spy: to have friendships that are deceptions, that are not honest.

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

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

I spent a whole career infiltrating places.

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

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

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days.

Anyone who tells you he deals with the CIA is either a fool (for admitting it) or a braggart.

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.

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

Spies go undercover. They take on different personas.

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

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

I love the spy genre.

I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us.

I always liked spy stories.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

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.