For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

One of the ideals [Margaret Thatcher] grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, short-term society. It is a paradox.

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

Beneath every history, another history.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.