Doug Liman Quotes

What I really found was that the one similarity between 'Covert Affairs' and 'Fair Game' is a deep love and admiration and fascination with the home life of a spy.

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.

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight.

I've always dreamt of having some sort of undercover job. I think it's probably the coolest thing in the world, but ultimately a very lonely life.

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.

I invented the historical spy novel.

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.

I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.

I actually thought, like, I was sure 'Get Smart' and, like, 'James Bond' movies, I was sure that that's what real life was like.

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

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.

It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.

However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it.

My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured on purpose and to read upside down and backwards and commit to memory every document in Germany he saw as he was being interrogated - every schedule on every wall. So, that photographic memory somehow made its way to me when I was young.

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

I always liked spy stories.

I've always wanted to be a spy, and frankly I'm a little surprised that British intelligence has never approached me.

I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants.

It is my writing dilemma. 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.

There are few archbishops in espionage. He's on our side and that's all that matters. Besides, one needn't ask him to one's club.

I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.

I always wanted to play characters, and that was definitely one - a Russian spy.

I'm clearly not an international man of mystery.

I wanted to be a journalist. The other thing I wanted to be was a spy.