I’m vulgar, I’m a populist. But isn’t that what the mayor should be?
I’m not taking any interest in politics. I’m not involved in politics in any way. My life is in writing now.
When a book comes out I wonder if one person will buy it. It’s agony. Of course it’s stupid, but it’s agony.
A work of art is worth what someone will pay for it.
When I was deputy chairman I could travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh without leaving Tory land. In a two-week period I covered every constituency in which we had an MP. There were 14. Now we have only one. We appear to have given up.
I think my attitude to human beings has changed since leaving prison.
But the thing I felt most strongly about, and put at the end of one of the prison diaries, was education.
I was allowed to ring the bell for five minutes until everyone was in assembly. It was the beginning of power.
The discipline required for athletics carried through to writing. You call it obsession. I call it discipline. By the way, I see nothing wrong with that.
The popularity of an individual in life often only manifests itself in death.
And I did wonder – because it’s now three years ago since I left prison – whether there would come a time when I would forget it, or it would be in the past as anything else might be – no, it’s there every day of my life.
But I certainly made mistakes, for which I regret, I think most human beings in their lifetime make mistakes, mine ended up in two years prison – two very remarkable years from which I learnt a lot.
I learnt a lot about myself, I learnt a lot about other people and the problems they have. If I was lucky enough to live to a hundred, how I will feel about two per cent of my life being that way, I don’t know.
War and Peace maddens me because I didn’t write it myself, and worse, I couldn’t.
At the end of my trial, I was rather hoping the judge would send me to Australia for the rest of my life.
Well I certainly have learned and I hope I’m moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.
It is often spur-of-the-moment decisions, sometimes made by others, that can change our whole lives.
I’m passionate again about writing. This is important to me; it’s got to be the comeback book.
If you have to pay a bill, always make it look as if the amount is of no consequence.
You see, the problem with being a bully is that on the flipside of that particular coin, you’ll find the imprint of a coward.