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

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.

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.

Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

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.