So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.

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.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.