When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.
Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
My grandmother, whom I adored, and who partly raised me, loved Liberace, and she watched Liberace every afternoon, and when she watched Liberace, she'd get dressed up and put on makeup because I think she thought if she could see Liberace, Liberace could see her.
When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.
I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.
I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
I'm not really a mass market writer.
Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
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 don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.
The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.
When I went to prep school in New York City, I had to ride the subway and learned how to do homework on the train. I can work and read through anything.
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.
If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they're all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They're disappointed, vengeful, angry.
I look for the dark story, where something secret was done. I read and read and pick up the trail of a true story. I use nothing but true stories. They are so much better than phony ones.
I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.
I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
