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" I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired. "

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" When the time comes to work, I work. "

" My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about! "

" I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them. "

" Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method. "

" Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century. "

" The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible. "

" We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'. "

" The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology. "

" Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature. "

" Cheese is good. And Britain, despite the grumblings of the French and the outrage of the Swiss, not to mention some plucky challenges from Italy, Austria, and Spain, has some of the best cheese in the world. We're world leaders in cheese. "

" I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured. "

" Peace is not a state - it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It's possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it's like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum, and your equilibrium is gone, too. "

" Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming. "

" In the aftermath of September 11, you can't - as Tony Blair was so fond of suggesting - draw a line under historical events. They don't go away. They come back. "

" I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass. "

" Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other. "

" Being a parent is weird. It changes people in subtle and unsubtle ways. In my case, it awoke a kind of manic sentinel in my brain. Anything in the house that might be a threat to the kids or to my wife gets terminated - food, sharp edges, poor wiring. "

" In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one. "

" The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means. "

" The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit. "

" In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline. "

" My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble. "

" Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player. "

" There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few. "

" Sir Terry Pratchett - he was knighted in 2009, and on him it looked earned rather than entitled - wrote about dragons, wizards, turtles, witches, time-travelling monks, and suitcases with legs. "

" I'm an irredeemable urbanite. I can't imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind. "

" All my characters are me, in one way or another. "

" Prize lists are out, and you're not on them? Nature of the world - means nothing. Prizes are a lottery. "

" I read my father's books growing up. I thought then and I still think now that his writing is wonderful. It delights and infuriates me in equal measure that he's still that good. "

" In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us. "