Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events.

It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.

Another of Cicero's maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don't agree.

For me, as I suspect for most people, there comes a point where you have enough. If you've got £20 million, why keep going until you've got £100 million or £1,000 million? Does anyone need another vast yacht or private jet or a house full of gold?

It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.