I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and stay there and put words together.

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.

First comes an idea. Then, characters begin to evolve out of the landscape of that idea. And then, finally, characters dominate: plot is simply a function of what these people might do or be. Everything has to flow from their personalities; otherwise it will not be emotionally engaging, or plausible.

You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.

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.

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

People perish. Books are immortal.