Machiavelli did believe that it was better to appear to be good than to be good. If you’re good, you’re just too vulnerable, but if you appear to be good, you get all the benefits plus you can be sneaky and, when necessary, stab someone in the back. David Ignatius Read Quote
The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what’s happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, ‘If I know A and B, then I’ve got to know that C and D are coming,’ and that’s kind of the way it’s been with my fiction. David Ignatius Read Quote
The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they’re actually going. David Ignatius Read Quote
Sometimes James Bond movies drive me crazy. They’re fun to watch, but they don’t have anything to do at all with what intelligence officers really do. David Ignatius Read Quote
I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story. David Ignatius Read Quote
This experience of getting so lost in my writing that I lose track of time, or of anything outside the imagined world, is a release for me. David Ignatius Read Quote
Empty political space will be filled by extremists unless the United States and its allies build strong local forces that can suppress terrorist groups and warlords both. When the U.S. creates such local forces, it must be persistent. If it withdraws from these efforts, as America did in Iraq in 2011, it invites mayhem. David Ignatius Read Quote
Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies. David Ignatius Read Quote
I’ve tried, in ‘Bloodmoney,’ to tell a story that gets at the crazy relationship between the ISI and the CIA, these absolutely fascinating, often mutually destructive two scorpions in a bottle kind of relationship that they have. David Ignatius Read Quote
We have a complicated intelligence relationship with France. We have a complicated intelligence relationship with other – with other allies. David Ignatius Read Quote
