I never go back over something I've done and I never watch them again.

It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone.

The minute you become a leader of a country, you go into a very small club. You join that sort of pantheon of other world leaders.

I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama, because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.

There's no way of telling why you want to do things beforehand. Something just grabs you. It might not grab you six months later, and it might not have grabbed you six months before, but at that particular moment it grabs you, so you jump on it.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable, rather than its literal narrative.

The stuff that I have perhaps become known for that's based on fact, and English statesmen shouting at each other all the time, doesn't entirely represent who I am. I am not a politics wonk.