27 Quotes by Charles McCarry

China, hidden and mysterious, has always interested me.

People are dying to tell you their secrets; it's just a matter of getting the conversation going in the right direction. If you just let people fill the silence, they will let you the most extraordinary things. I sometimes wonder if afterward they remember what they've said.

Other writers tell me about these bushel baskets delivered at the front door. If I've gotten 50 letters over the last 18 years, I'd be surprised.

I write in a very peculiar way. I think about a book for 25 or 30 years in a kind of inchoate way, and at one point or another, I realize the book is ready to be written. I usually have a character, a first line, and general idea of what the book is going to be about.

When it comes to the assignment of blame, the CIA has by and large been a luckless organization.

Espionage and counterespionage go together like horse and carriage.

There's nothing new about European anti-Americanism. To go to a dinner party of intellectuals in Paris in 1960 was like walking into a tiger's den with a piece of raw meat in your hands.

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.

I've certainly written a lot of things that have more or less come true. But I don't have a gift for prophecy.