I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.

The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

The first casualty in any war is the truth. In World War II, I was part of a group of people who used to meet once a week with the sole purpose of analyzing the news and trying to work out what we weren't being told. We thought that we were clever, but we had absolutely no idea what was really going on. It was only years later that we learned the true story.