Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

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.

As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.

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