“I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.”

Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

Human behavior is timeless.

The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.

Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.

While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.

When people don’t have an objective, there’s much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

The whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.

To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

If you’re a writer, you’re always working.

… I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of “writer’s block”.

The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

I decided Widmore was the evilest of the evil, but in the end, not even the writers knew.

When you’re tied to one show, you are very much at the mercy of the writers so you can suddenly get a script where you have a heart attack and die.

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.

I’m a genre writer.