“A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.”
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My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
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.
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.