I'm a democrat - I don't support Bush, I don't support Blair, I don't support Bin Laden.

There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.

The way a government treats refugees is very instructive.

If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.

Britain today is suffering from galloping obsolescence.

The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it - a bit like Christians in the Church of England.

We are paying a heavy political price for 20 years in which, as a party, we have played down our criticism of capitalism and soft-peddled our advocacy of socialism

The Tory party is the enemy of democracy.

I think very often the boat-rockers turn out to be the people who are building the craft

The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen.

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.

It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.

I just write mechanical things.

I stop and think before I start a new book and ask myself do I really want to spend the next year or two or three with these characters because if I don't, then I shouldn't be writing about them.

The trick was looking past the illusion, because the exit was never as far away as it seemed.

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

I have a deep attachment to the natural world. It's a major influence on my writing, and as I look out over the wonderful snow-covered Santa Fe hills, I'm grateful for every day that I live here.

Avoid shame, but do not seek glory; nothing so expensive as glory.

Some people do not eat cow meat. I do so, provided it's tender.