That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.

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.

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

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.