For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.

When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

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