Rashida Jones Quotes

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

Spies go undercover. They take on different personas.

Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies.

I love the spy genre.

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

'The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.

I always liked spy stories.

The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

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.

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

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'

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.

An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy [against its own government]. Its members can travel about at home and abroad under secret orders, and no questions are asked. Every scrap of paper in the files, its membership, its expenditure of funds, its contacts, even enemy contacts, are state secrets.

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.

It is important to seek out the spies that the enemy has sent to spy on you so you can bribe them to really spy for you.

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

Clandestine intelligence operations involve a constant breaking of all the rules.. To put it baldly, such operations are extra legal and sometimes illegal.

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

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.

I was a case officer, otherwise known as an operations officer. My role was to go out and convince Al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us as well as to convince people and officials in foreign governments to work on behalf of the U.S. government secretly.

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

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