At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.

I deliberately made an effort not to become an expert on the ballet.

Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

Whenever I go to work I wear a jacket and a tie, because I'm inherently quite lazy, and my books take so long to do, and my publishers don't bug me, so it's so easy to fool yourself into thinking you're working harder than you really are.

Among the reasons that you go into journalism, I suppose, are some rather idealistic, even foolish reasons. In my case one of the reasons was I wanted to explain how things really work, how political power really works.

I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless

My interest is in power. How power works.