I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.

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.

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

People perish. Books are immortal.

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

In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

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