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

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

You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

For me, as I suspect for most people, there comes a point where you have enough. If you've got £20 million, why keep going until you've got £100 million or £1,000 million? Does anyone need another vast yacht or private jet or a house full of gold?

One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.