The history of the CIA brims with inquiries that cowed our spies and ruined their careers.

But frankly—may I so speak?—your CIA people's theory strikes me as a miserable bundle of random suspicions, a few separate facts strung together by an intricate structure of ad hoc theorizing, in which everyone is credited with enormous powers for intrigue. A much simpler view can be entertained with more common sense, and as a CIA employee you must be aware that, like all intelligence agencies, it lacks the faculty of common sense.

Neither is a memoir the same as a biography, which aims for the most objective, factual account of a life. A memoir, as I understand it, makes no pretense of denying its subjectivity. Its matter is one person’s memory, and memory by nature is selective and colored by emotion. Others who participated in the events I describe will no doubt remember some details differently, though I hope we would agree on the essential truths. I have taken no liberties with the past as I remember it, used no fictional devices beyond reconstructing conversations from memory. I have not blended characters, or bent chronology to convenience. And yet I have tried to tell a good story.

I use the furniture of espionage to amuse the reader, to make the reader listen to me, because most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

I'm a spy... I worked for the CIA 15 years. The cover was I worked for the insurance business.

[Asked "Did counter-espionage mean informing on people who were fighting against the communist project?"] That's what would be expected from me, but I don't remember doing [anything like that]. I had nothing to do - I was sitting in my office and writing - it was hardly a field in which you could collect interesting information.

The life of a historian or any other academic is not very interesting - in fact it's quite boring. I read a great deal as a child...

I loathe writing autobiographical material because if it's dull no-one should have to read it anyway, and if it's interesting I should be using it for a story.

Knowledge or no knowledge, the intelligence community is obliged to furnish estimates to military planners, even if they’re worthless and very possibly misleading. If you are one of those strange ducks trying to understand what this nuclear business is all about and read the “respectable” journals the CIA leaks information to, please don’t get the idea this makes you a more respectable arm chair analyst than anyone else.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

The history books which contain no lies are extremely tedious

I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.