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

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.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

We have a number of very powerful women in the world now - Mrs. [Angela] Merkel, who the Germans call Mutti. What did we call Mrs. [Margaret] Thatcher? When she was minister of education, she stopped the children's free school milk. This may sound quaint, but after the war we were such a malnourished nation that part of the founding of the welfare state were public health initiatives. Every little schoolchild got milk. Mrs. Thatcher stopped it. They called her "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher."

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.

I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes.

I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.