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.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Illiteracy is rampant. People are out of communication.

The inventions and the great discoveries have opened up whole continents to reciprocal communication and interchange, provided we are willing.

The longing for peace is rooted in the hearts of all men. But the striving, which at present has become so insistent, cannot lay claim to such an ambition as leading the way to eternal peace, or solving all disputes among nations.

I think always having somebody that you trust and you know can help in the communication, that is very important.

If you improve a teacher's self-esteem, confidence, communication skills or stress levels, you improve that teacher's overall effectiveness across the curriculum.

A life coach does for the rest of your life what a personal trainer does for your health and fitness.

I don't like talking unnecessarily, and my communication skills are zilch. I just can't converse with people. Maybe it's because of my stuttering or stammering, but I'm not confident of talking with people. I only talk to very close friends and family.

Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out of the window.

Whether we notice it or not, we spend our days negotiating for something: for our spouse to do more housework, a child to eat just three more bites or go to bed on time, an extended deadline on a project, a salary increase, a better rate on a vacation package.

Negotiation is often described as the art of letting the other side have your way. You have to give the other side a chance to put stuff on the table voluntarily.

There is never going to be a substitute for face-to-face communication, but we have seen since the alphabet, to the telephone and now the Internet, that whenever people find a new way to communicate, they will flock to it.

Technologies evolve in the strangest ways. Computers were created to calculate ballistics equations, and now we use them to create amusing illusions. Creating amusing illusions is a big business if you play it right.

Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn't want these little toys on their desk.

We like technology because we don't have to talk to anybody.

Inexpensive phones and pay-as-you go services are already spreading mobile phone technology to many parts of that world that never had a wired infrastructure.

Technology no longer consists just of hardware or software or even services, but of communities. Increasingly, community is a part of technology, a driver of technology, and an emergent effect of technology.

We're moving into an era when things are dematerialised and much more holographic. Floating above the physical world and the geographic map, there's another landscape that's constantly changing - something like a cloud - of communication, information, exchange and commerce.

Communication is paramount, and what medium or what format you utilize should be a non-issue. In some respects, that has created a barrier for new media, especially web new media, because often times maybe the media itself comes before the concept, before the ideas, and ends up navigating or dictating the outcome.

I can't be a hypocrite as a coach because as a player that's what I wanted. I wanted feedback, I wanted communication from the boss. I showed up for work, you can yell at me if you want, but I want input. So that's the kind of coach I want to be.

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Teaching is the royal road to learning.

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all.

Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you.

A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.

Marriage is give and take. You'd better give it to her or she'll take it anyway.

Do not worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older it will avoid you.

You can't keep changing men, so you settle for changing your lipstick.

When I look in the mirror I see the girl I was when I was growing up, with braces, crooked teeth, a baby face and a skinny body.

I don't have a type. But one thing I can say from my dating experience is that a physical attraction will only take you so far. So you definitely have to have a strong intellectual connection as well.

I don't want to be one of those 40-something guys in L.A. still dating, still going out to clubs and chasing 21-year-olds. It's not a good look.

In my own relationships, I know that I should break up with someone who doesn't encourage me to be strong and make my own choices and do what's best in my life, so if you're dating someone who doesn't want you to be the best person you can be, you shouldn't be dating them.

It has to be able to play at the maximum expression and communication in every style, and the only way you can do that is - like Verdi said - working with a file, every day, little by little, until the orchestra's collective qualities emerge.

It was just that we had this phenomenal honeymoon relationship that just kept on going.