As ever with modern Britain, we are let down by a vast, over-manned, over-funded, hidebound, obstructive, box-ticking and incompetent bureaucracy.

The stubbornness of a weak man should never be underestimated. The weak tend to be very stubborn when they've decided on something.

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

In the 66 years that I have been alive, there has not been one hour, of one day, of one month, of one year, when there has not been a threat aimed at us.

On Foreign Secretary Robin Cook: If a man cannot keep a measly affair secret, what is he doing in charge of the Intelligence Service?

The Internet offers authors and their readers a new diversity of opportunities and freedom.

The British have always coped without becoming a dictatorship.

… Shannon’s fingers itched to smash the man in the face. Inside his head he kept telling himself, Keep cool, baby, absolutely cool.

'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' Big, big, big smash for me. My birth of the love of cinema was born with 'Close Encounters' and '2001.' Those sci-fi movies I saw when I was a little kid.

It is in lonely solitude that God delivers His best thoughts, and the mind needs to be still and quiet to receive them.

There is no reason to believe that the nature of the violent minorities is now greatly different from what it was in the past. What has changed is the will and ability of the majority to react.

If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.

Poetry is a kind of gasp, and there it is, a spark on the page. Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.

Whoever does not accept my teaching may not be saved - for it is God's teaching and not mine.

I'm not a racist, that's what so insane about this. And yet it is said. It comes through, it fires out of me, and even now in the passion that's here as I confront myself.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

I've called science fiction 'reality ahead of schedule'

Everybody dies, Sally. The thing is to die well.