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

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.

Leaders should never, ever try to look cool – that’s for dictators

I don’t consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.

If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not; then marriages would be truly made in heaven.