Quotes

[om George Segal, who played the character Quiller on film] Segal is a fine romantic actor but is certainly not Quiller . . . He doesn't look harrowed enough. He doesn't look weathered enough. [Humphrey Bogart], had he been the right age at the right time, would have been perfect.

We don't live nearly enough spiritually, and I'm not talking about religion. I don't have a religion. But I happen to know that the atoms of my body were inside the Big Bang. My religion, if I ever had one, was that I am a part of the cosmos. And therefore I feel that if I can turn the key or open the door, or whatever you want to call it, I can tap the energy of the cosmos. And we all can.

[on studying martial arts] I know myself better. I know other people better. There's nothing quite like karate to reveal character. I always said that I can tell what a man is like by the way he drives a car. Now I can tell by the way he walks into the dojo.

[on the screen versions of his popular character, Quiller] He's so difficult to film, realistically. They give him a gun, they give him a blonde. I think the film people are absolutely afraid of Quiller. If they shoot him as he is, they're afraid that nobody's going to be interested.

It all began officially, I suppose when the Lord told Moses to "spy out the land of Canaan." That was the briefing.

Most of my favorite writers are still English. Not because they are English, but because they come across more neurotic for me. Take "The Bridesmaid" by Ruth Rendell. I think it's a wonderful study in neurosis. They always keep the stiff upper lip, which makes it even more intriguing, more mysterious. That's why I think all the best spy novelists come from England--because of the fog, and the frequent frontiers, the underhandedness, and the secrecy. In America, whether they succeed or not, they try to do everything aboveboard, they want an accounting from the CIA about how much they've spent this year. You can't run a spy agency like that, you can't respond to the public, it's got to be secret. And the public has got to trust that [the spy agency] is not to do anything too dirty in their name; it doesn't always work, of course . . .

I find the Americans much more open-minded and open-hearted than the English and the French, who were so terribly conservative . . . You don't talk to anybody until you've been introduced and all that nonsense. I tell the Americans I like a country where they wear their hearts on their sleeves; they want to communicate, they want to know what I'm thinking. It's a country of a great many faults: the crime situation is quite atrocious, and television and so on. But despite that I am far happier here than I was in Europe.

[Harold Pinter]'s obviously an extremely fine playwright, but I think he hasn't got the knack of adapting. I think he's too obtrusive.