Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.

God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.

I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.

I think that most of my books are part of some process of self-education, often about the places I go to. Most of all, they are about the peculiar tension between institutional loyalty and loyalty to oneself; the mystery of patriotism, for a Brit of my age and generation, where it runs, how it should be defined, what it's worth and what a corrupting force it can be when misapplied. All that stuff is just in me and it comes out in the characters. I don't mean to preach, but I know I do, and I'm a very flawed person. It's quite ridiculous.