The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.

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.

The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

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.

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.

History is too important to be left to the historians.