By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

[Boxer is] the ultimate tool for the serious pro' that can't afford the time and patience to mess around with lesser products.

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.

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.

Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

A police state is a country run by criminals

But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn't stupid. They just take a bit more time, that's all.