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.

The true currency of life is time, not money, and we've all got a limited stock of that.

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.

I think it's very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you're in the top in politics, especially if you're there for a long time.

What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason

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

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.