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.

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.

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

What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!

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.

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

It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.