To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.
If one first gives himself to the Lord, all other giving is easy.
My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.
One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They’re too big, too fast. I think that’s quite scary.
Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.
Politics is never a victory, it’s just the remorseless grinding forward of events.
Storytelling has a narcotic power.
My greatest regret as a writer is that I’ve never been able to include as many jokes as I’d like.
It’s when you’ve stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you’re asleep, that the real work is done.
It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.
History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.
Don’t try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.
I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.
If you go back, ‘The Great Gatsby’ would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.
In a way I’m almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.
Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don’t agree.
Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?
Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.
You find out what you think by talking to yourself.