For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.

Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.

There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.