Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

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.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

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 can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.