It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.

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.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.

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

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

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