I don’t think that there are very many good writers who don’t live without a sense of tension. If they haven’t got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.
There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing.
I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I’ve sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That’s the saddest thing of all, because they’re locked up and no one else can make them.
For better or worse, I’ve been involved in the description of political conflict.
A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.
The good pupils are often brilliant, and they keep you on your toes and take you to the limits of your knowledge. The worst pupils provide a unique insight into the criminal mind.
Elections are a Western jerk-off.
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
All power corrupts but some must govern.
No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.
The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven’t.
Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.
Home’s where you go when you run out of homes.
It’s death, that’s what I’m suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.
I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.