I sneaked into an Everton match once. I'm a Liverpool supporter, but Liverpool were away, Liverpool reserves weren't playing, there wasn't even a youth match, so I took my son into an Everton match. God help me. It wasn't me.

We need an NHS with fewer managers, fewer contractors and more power (rather than choice) to patients - with the input of the real experts: healthcare professionals.

We believe that leaders should be following the masses. We only ran in leadership campaigns to get our ideas across, to use it as a platform.

I think that I was the first MP to call for the nationalisation of Northern Rock, although that is hardly surprising because I have been calling for the nationalisation of the financial sector for 30 years or more.

Money begets money. If you don't have that, you wait around to be hired by somebody at the mercy of others. If you have that money in your hand, you desperately try to make the best use of it and move ahead. And that's generating income for yourself.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Innovations in science and technology are the engines of the 21st-century economy; if you care about the wealth and health of your nation tomorrow, then you'd better rethink how you allocate taxes to fund science. The federal budget needs to recognize this.

The only wealth in this world is children, more than all the money, power on earth.