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...
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...
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.
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.
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 w...
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.
I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.
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.
You find out what you think by talking to yourself.
Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin's murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.
Writers of fiction should stick to writing, not pop up on panel shows or as a talking head.
My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.
Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.
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.
Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.
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 li...
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.
I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.
