“Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.”

The worst thing about being a great power is when you’re not one any more. It takes centuries to get over it.

I think it is very difficult to legislate for morality.

We’ve all got to look at ourselves, start with yourself, that’s all you can do. I believe that we can act responsibly as a group, it’s just that there are vested interests telling us not to bother.

I try hard not to preach, but I get carried away, which is a mistake, but it’s a risk worth running.

The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.

My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for fluffy.

You’re mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund

I exercise hard and the reason I do is so that I can earn the things I like to consume.

And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they’ve read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence.

I’m easy to work with, not a pushover, but I respond to criticism and find it inspiring.

For the past seventeen years I have been experimenting with lager. I am a lager user and one drug leads to another. If you do lager, as night follows day, you’ll end up doing Kentucky Fried Chicken.

There are lots of things I could have done for the money, but I’ve made a great living doing the things I want to do.

I loved writing ‘Two Brothers’ more than anything else I have written. It’s the first book I’ve written that I’ve always known I wanted to write. Having said that, it also kept me awake at nights.

My favourite things are jokes, friendliness and feeling comfortable.

Kinsey would identify himself with Galileo in moments of feelings of persecution.

It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.

One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.

Every time I bomb out, I have to come back. I have a feeling after a bad race that my next one will be good.

Fear of feeling bad rarely makes one feel good.

There is a lovely warmness about feelings of nostalgia as though in one’s head one is putting on a pair of comfy old slippers and curling up in front of a fire.

You are in charge of your thoughts and feelings. If you are willing to search for the reason that you can’t let go of disturbing thoughts, you can learn about yourself and restore your own peace of mind.