JEFFREY ARCHER

I'm passionate again about writing. This is important to me; it's got to be the comeback book.

I think when you've lost an election by 179, there's going to be a period of time after eighteen years in government when you can't do anything right, and people just kick you for the sake of it, will never admit they voted Conservative.

When a book comes out I wonder if one person will buy it. It's agony. Of course it's stupid, but it's agony.

When I was deputy chairman I could travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh without leaving Tory land. In a two-week period I covered every constituency in which we had an MP. There were 14. Now we have only one. We appear to have given up.

Actually, Sydney is my second favourite city on earth, I love Sydney, but this is the greatest.

I feel I have had a very interesting life, but I am rather hoping there is still more to come. I still haven't captained the England cricket team, or sung at Carnegie Hall!

The discipline required for athletics carried through to writing. You call it obsession. I call it discipline. By the way, I see nothing wrong with that.

I learnt a lot about myself, I learnt a lot about other people and the problems they have. If I was lucky enough to live to a hundred, how I will feel about two per cent of my life being that way, I don't know.

We go on a lot in this country about offences being caused by drugs. The truth is just as many offences are caused by drink. And that should be taken into account.

I've loved art for more than 30 years.

Whenever you analyse anyone who has had any success and they're in the headlines, you will find they are human and make mistakes. I'm certainly that and I've made a lot of mistakes.

Sixty per cent of people entering prison today are illiterate.

At the end of my trial, I was rather hoping the judge would send me to Australia for the rest of my life.

I was allowed to ring the bell for five minutes until everyone was in assembly. It was the beginning of power.

I think my attitude to human beings has changed since leaving prison.

Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

Very few people deserted me when I went to prison. They stayed loyal.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

I'm not involved in politics any more and they're quite right.

But I certainly made mistakes, for which I regret, I think most human beings in their lifetime make mistakes, mine ended up in two years prison - two very remarkable years from which I learnt a lot.

Exclusive will not be published in book format.

And I did wonder - because it's now three years ago since I left prison - whether there would come a time when I would forget it, or it would be in the past as anything else might be - no, it's there every day of my life.

I am currently doing about 30 charity auctions a year.

When I was three, I wanted to be four. When I was four, I wanted to be prime minister.

Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.