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" 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. "

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" We say, 'The market plummets,' like it's some roaring creature. "

" Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again. "

" Orwell has always been a huge influence on me. "

" 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. "

" Leaders today are isolated by phalanxes of body guards. It's profoundly undemocratic, the way they have used terrorism as a means to protect themselves. "

" It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done. "

" The financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology. "

" The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels. "

" History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events. "

" Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price. "

" For me, as I suspect for most people, there comes a point where you have enough. If you've got £20 million, why keep going until you've got £100 million or £1,000 million? Does anyone need another vast yacht or private jet or a house full of gold? "

" 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. "

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

" Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was quite different then. "

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

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

" Storytelling has a narcotic power. "

" 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. "

" One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary. "

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

" We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that. "

" There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life. "

" 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. "

" Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you've yet to be published, is like having a medical condition impossible to mention in polite company - it's a relief simply to know there are fellow-sufferers out there. "

" 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. "

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

" My father left school at 14, my mother at 13. My father was clever and well-read. He took a newspaper, always watched the news, discussed it all the time. "

" My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected. "

" 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. "

" I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies. "