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.

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

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

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

People perish. Books are immortal.

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.

Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.