I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.

Love means having something to betray.

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?

When it comes to recruiting people for the secret world, what the recruiters are looking for is pretty much what I had. I was unanchored, looking for an institution to look after me. I had a bit of larceny. I understood larceny. I understood the natural criminality in people - because it was - it was all around me. And I have no doubt there was a chunk of it inside me too. Once I found that identity, it took root in me. It exactly - it gelled with the world that I'd known in the past.

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.

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.