In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat.

A nation's not a child, for God's sake. ... It's like a wild horse you tame by breaking it. Or a fiery woman you slap till she sees sense and warms your bed.

It's a long ride home with nothing but me for company. I bore myself sometimes. Not often. Just now and again.

The only sheets I'll ever long for are my own.

There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised nervous breakdown designed, with a bit of luck, to produce something worthwhile at the end.

Talking to Lee Child and discovering, from his chapter in The Chopin Manuscript, that he's even more of an audio geek than I am (as his chapter in Chopin proves).

What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire.