James Sanborn Quotes

This is the wonderful thing about espionage, nothing exists any more.

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.

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.

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.

Spying has always gone on since ancient times.

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

Intelligence without counter-intelligence is useless.

I had been given some training in my past CIA career to do just this sort of thing ... floating forged newspaper accounts, telegrams, that sort of thing.

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.

I excelled in finding and acquiring secret information that I obtained in brush passes, dead drops, or in meetings in dusty alleys of third world capitals.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

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

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

With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War adversaries without running the risk of getting caught.

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.

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

I am always up to steal secrets from smart people.

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.

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

I think that, in the end, the military behavior and intelligence services are not very different from each other. It's an attitude of hunters; they're observing the prey.

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

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

I'm sort of fascinated by the whole espionage crime thing.

It was awesome and liberating to play a Russian spy.