“It’s a living,” she said.
“It’s not a real living. All this spying. Spying on what? Secret agents discovering what everybody knows already…”
“Or just making it up,” she said. He stopped short, and she went on without a change of voice. “There are lots of other jobs that aren’t real. Designing a new plastic soapbox, making pokerwork jokes for public-houses, writing advertising slogans, being an M. P., talking to UNESCO conferences. But the money’s real. What happens after work is real. I mean, your daughter is real and her seventeenth birthday is real.”
“What do you do after work?”
“Nothing much now, but when I was in love… we went to cinemas and drank coffee in Expresso bars and sat on summer evenings in the Park.”
Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958)