Spy Quotes - Page 8

• Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them.

  Karen Abbott

  Men, Two, Female

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• I end up feeling like a spy in the house of ethnicity, you know? Because people will talk around me as they would talk around the people in their cultural group. So I get to hear all the secrets and jokes and you know, I'm a part of every community because of the way I look.

  Sherman Alexie

  Ethnicity, People, House

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I think suspense should be like any other color on a writers palette. I suppose Im in the minority but I think its crazy for literary fiction to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

  Jess Walter

  Crazy, Ghetto, Divorce

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• If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.

  Herta Muller

  Risk, Needs, Might

  "Herta Müller: a life in books". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2012.

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• I think that is so interesting. It is le Carré. There must be so much of him when he was younger. He's an interesting character. I don't want to say the word "passive" because there is something very active about the way he is passive, if that makes any sense: the nature of his watching and his listening is active. It is always so alive because he is, essentially, a spy.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Character, Thinking, Interesting

  "Tom Hiddleston talks John le Carré's The Night Manager". Interview with Ian Nathan, www.empireonline.com. February 23, 2016.

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• But strangely, [in] the original Matt Helm books, he's just this super hardass assassin. They sort of made it into a sexy romp for the movies. The books are very, very dark. I also watched 'OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies,' which is a French film. They just made a second one, I think, which is based on like, 100 novels. They're just fantastic. They're set in the '60s. A lot of the visual inspiration definitely came from 1960 James Bond movies and 'OSS 177' and also 'Pink Panther' movies.

  Adam Reed

  Sexy, Book, Inspiration

  Interview with Vlada Gelman, www.avclub.com. February 24, 2011.

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• My perception of making a movie before I started making movies was that it would be like “Spy Kids.”

  Katie Chang

  Kids, Perception, Would Be

  "Katie Chang & Israel Broussard On ‘The Bling Ring’ & Staging Fake Break-Ins For Research". Interview with Christopher Rosen, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 13, 2013.

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• Writing about magic is harder than writing about spies because you're dealing with something that doesn't really exist.

  Anthony Horowitz

  Writing, Magic, Harder

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• Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can't find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.

  Lauren Graham

  Father, Thinking, Keys

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• I've always been aware of the otherworld, of spirits that exist in that twilight place that lies in the corner of our eyes, of fairie and stranger things still that we spy only when we're not really paying attention to them, whispers and flickering shadows, here one moment, gone the instant we turn our heads for a closer look. But I couldn't always find them. And when I did, for a long time I thought they were only this excess of imagination that I carry around inside me, that somehow it was leaking out of me into the world.

  Charles de Lint

  Lying, Twilight, Eye

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• And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Eye, Bishops, Peers

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.231

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• To me it was real war and my life was at stake, and I believe that all those clandestine spy games we played as children helped when the Occupation came.

  Diet Eman

  Children, Real, War

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• I find a difference in British spy fiction and American spy fiction. In the American version, it's more militaristic, partly because the CIA has more of the military makeup. Whereas MI6 is more of a cerebral, intelligence-based, relationship-based service, i.e., all they do is recruit people to get information out of them.

  Charles Cumming

  Military, Makeup, Differences

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• He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed."

  Diogenes

  Kings, Greed, Insatiable

  "Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6: The Cynics". Book by Diogenes Laërtius translated by R. D. Hicks, 1925.

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• Most thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false morality that vanishes as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one monitored in the police station or an imaginary one in heaven.

  Richard Dawkins

  Real, Thoughtful, People

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.263, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Love is a spy who is plotting treason, In league with that warm, red rebel, the Heart.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Love, Heart, League

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2016). “Complete Poetical Works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Delphi Classics)”, p.406, Delphi Classics

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• The drug war isn't what purports to be. If you look at the whole operation and the tie-in between the American intelligence agencies, these so-called "assets", the spies on the payroll of the CIA, and drug dealers. Don't let members of Congress and the media get away with this complacency and distortion!

  Jerry Brown

  War, Ties, Agency

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• Happy those early days when I Shined in my Angel-infancy. Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back (at that short space) Could see a glimpse of His bright face. When on some gilded cloud or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity.

  Henry Vaughan

  Flower, Angel, First Love

  Silex Scintillans "The Retreat" l. 1 (1650 - 1655)

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• Right whales, for all their size, are surprisingly athletic. They roll, they slap their flukes, they lift their heads out of the water in a move known as a spy hop. They find playthings and are particularly fond of swimming repeatedly through clumps of seaweed, which slides over them like a feathered boa.

  Tim Cahill

  Moving, Swimming, Whales

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• Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those "easy speeches that comfort cruel men.

  Timothy Garton Ash

  Lying, Hero, Men

  Timothy Garton Ash (2012). “Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name”, p.10, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I played the mom in Spy Kids when I was, like, 27. So it was ridiculous. But [Robert Rodriguez] was like, "You know what? If we do our job right, no one will question it." And nobody did.

  Carla Gugino

  Mom, Jobs, Kids

  "A little white lie made Carla Gugino Troop Beverly Hills' tallest scout". Interview with Erik Adams, www.avclub.com. June 17, 2015.

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• Spies could be invaluable in peacetime, once the fighting actually started, their value dropped steeply. When the swords were out, it was the information your own scouts provided that mattered, not reports from unknown people whose veracity you couldn't prove.

  David Weber

  War, Fighting, People

  David Weber (2014). “Safehold Boxed Set 1: Off Armageddon Reef, By Schism Rent Asunder, and By Heresies Distressed”, p.709, Tor Science Fiction

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• From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance.

  Charles Tilly

  Men, People, Political

  Charles Tilly, Gabriel Ardant, Social Science Research Council (U.S.). Committee on Comparative Politics (1975). “The Formation of national States in Western Europe”, Princeton Univ Pr

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• I have a long-standing interest in what I like to think of as "forbidden knowledge": methods of unarmed killing, lock picking, breaking and entry, spy stuff, and other things that the government wants only a few select individuals to know.

  Barry Eisler

  Thinking, Government, Long

  "For Barry Eisler, when it rains, it pours". Interview with Mark Schreiber, www.japantimes.co.jp. September 7, 2003.

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• The Soul unto itself
  Is an imperial friend, -
  Or the most agonizing Spy -
  An Enemy - could send -

  Emily Dickinson

  Friendship, Soul, Enemy

  Emily Dickinson, Ralph William Franklin (1999). “The Poems of Emily Dickinson”, p.261, Harvard University Press

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