In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.

Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.

One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.

In a generation or two, or maybe sooner, young golfers of true sporting instinct will wonder why all this handling of the ball is necessary. It will seem to them that the game is not as good as it might be.