Robert Harris

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

Cicero smiled at us. 'The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.

People will perish, but books are immortal.

What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason.

You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!