If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

Even a secret agent can't lie to a Jewish mother.

I'd be a terrible secret agent. I can't keep a secret and I'm not sneaky.

I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.

Oh, I can keep many secrets, so I would be a phenomenal secret agent. I love secrets.

Before Jason Bourne, before Jack Ryan, there was Bond, James Bond, the original two-dimensional, world-saving secret agent.

I don't think anyone should grow up wanting to go around killing people. I don't think anyone should grow up wanting to be a secret agent.

I used to play football with a load of lads, and I would be like a secret agent going out with a hat on so they wouldn't see my hair in a bun.

I've always thought that there is a great female James Bond movie to be done. I'm not literally calling her Jane Bond, I mean, but a female secret agent.

I wanted to do everything. I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to be a secret agent. I wanted to be a fireman and a doctor, all that. So I related that through movies and stuff.

In 'The Secret Agent,' it's basically a character that was admired by Theodore Kaczynski, which is some fan mail you don't really want to open. This is a man who is a chemist and who specializes in making bombs and despises humanity.

I grew up thinking that I would be an ambassador secret agent. From age 14 to right before I graduated college, I was really interested in the foreign service and the United Nations. I learned to speak French, Turkish, and all these things.

Of all those in the army close to the commander none is more intimate than the secret agent; of all rewards none more liberal than those given to secret agents; of all matters none is more confidential than those relating to secret operations.

'The Secret Agent,' Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich - in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash - has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age.

Owen Wilson is an actor, but think of him as a sort of secret agent. He has an offbeat, indie-movie sensibility. Every so often, however, he infiltrates some big-budget movie he clearly doesn't belong in - 'Anaconda,' 'Armageddon,' 'The Haunting' - and struggles valiantly to stop it from sucking.

'The Secret Agent' remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside. But 'Under Western Eyes' dares to leap inside - not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, 'the autocracy in mystic vestments.'

By comparison, 'The Secret Agent' is not especially prescient about terrorism, certainly not technically. The Professor was a stock figure of Edwardian fiction, and his dreams of mass destruction were nothing ahead of their time. Many novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved plots far more deadly.

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