[Margaret Thatcher] is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for "Who's Who," didn't include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent editions, I do not know.

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.

I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.