Robert Harris

“I used to love politics. I can't say I do any more. All the fun has gone out of it. Each side is engaged in this trench warfare of managerialism. They're all too scared to say anything that might make them appear something other than completely bland.”

“If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.”

“....let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end........Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”

“To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.”

“First comes an idea. Then, characters begin to evolve out of the landscape of that idea. And then, finally, characters dominate: plot is simply a function of what these people might do or be. Everything has to flow from their personalities; otherwise it will not be emotionally engaging, or plausible.”

“I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.”

“One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.”

“Writers of fiction should stick to writing, not pop up on panel shows or as a talking head.”

“I think it's very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you're in the top in politics - especially if you're there for a long time.”

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

“Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.”

“The true currency of life is time, not money, and we've all got a limited stock of that.”

“It's easy enough to get into power. You can make promises and try to be all things to all people. But the moment you have to make decisions, you're going to annoy at least half of them. Whatever you do, in the end you're almost certain to be brought down by your own character traits.”

“Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.”

“In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.”

“Writers and journalists tend to be simplistic about politics when, like all other areas of life, it's more complicated.”

“Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin's murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.”

“It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.”

“I can't get very excited about the House of Commons these days because I don't feel the power is there. What is really bizarre is that you sense it is not in Washington either. It is now very hard even to locate the levers of power, let alone to pull them and change things.”

“I think a lot of us feel, when we look at the Dow Jones plunging, alienated - you do feel as if we're in the grip of some alien force that slipped human control.”