When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

It was a charming fantasy of romantics that the spies would stop spying, that political conflict would end and politicians would tell the truth. Unfortunately that has not been the case.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.