Being a writer in Iceland, you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions; they love them, or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.

I think there are really serious problems in this country and I think politics in a lot of ways is failing the country.

I have a running conversation with a couple of colleagues. Mike Schmidt's one of them; some on my White House team are others; Alex Burns on the politics team is another. That just helps me not lose my place, right? We're just constantly talking about what we're hearing and where things are.

Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.

I personally feel that an actor should not take an important part in politics.

I thought you would have to be insane to go into politics.

I think if you want to go into politics, you have to take a very long-term view with regards to what you want to achieve. You can't make changes in just a short time.

Britain, along with the U.S.A., is war weary, and after the travesty of Iraq and Afghanistan, has grave misgivings in any future involvement in the Middle East. The ghost of Tony Blair and his single-minded determination to attack Iraq, at any cost, has cast a long shadow over British politics. The British public have a long collective memory.

Are Labour members inherently bigoted against women, unable to objectively assess political attributes beyond the gender prism? This accusation seems particularly ludicrous when levelled at a party so much in thrall to identity politics that it sometimes feels more like a student union than an organisation set up to defend the working class.

Politics as a parent is fairly demanding; if your parent is in politics, it's fairly demanding, so I make no excuses about taking two weeks off.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

I never thought I was going to get involved in politics other than the DA's office.

I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

There are few things more amusing in the world of politics than watching moderate Republicans charging to the right in pursuit of greater glory.

Newt Gingrich is one of the brightest people in the Republican Party and he's always been a little unorthodox in his approach to politics, but that's what makes him Newt Gingrich.

I'm not good at talking politics. I'm probably not well-versed enough to speak out, but I do have my opinions and my feelings and frustrations, especially with regards to the environment and sustainability and our lack of taking care of what we have.

In politics, there are no permanent enemies or friends.

Everything is politics.

Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.