A biography for Alastair Campbellhasn’t been written yet.
“I'm certainly driven, I hate losing, I can be ruthless and short-tempered and terribly competitive.”
“Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.”
“Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.”
“The bad news for journalists today is that the media, however seriously people who are in the public eye take it, is not taken as seriously as it once was - by the public.”
“One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.”
“I want to write more books, see my first novel made into a film, fight more campaigns, work in more countries. I want to be able to recall experiences that have endured for their pleasure and range and intensity.”
“Don't accept that you are in crisis just because everyone says you are.”
“Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.”
“I have always been driven. I have always believed in what I believe very deeply.”
“There is something in me that makes me see things through.”
“My aunty says I'm the double of my father. He was a workaholic, which I've definitely inherited. And like me, he could be the life and soul of the party, but also quite withdrawn.”
“Like most meaningful activities, campaigns are team games.”
“One in four of us will have a mental illness at some point. That is a lot of people.”
“So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb.”