"I always wanted to work at 'Take A Break' magazine, you know, just to inject a little bit of politics into their stories. I applied for a job there after I'd done my law degree and didn't even get an interview. I only wrote 'Garnethill' because I didn't get that job!"
"Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future."
John F. Kennedy on Politics"Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress but I repeat myself."
Mark Twain on Politics"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
Plato on Politics"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
Milton Friedman on Politics"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
Joseph Stalin on Politics"Even if people do wrong, we're social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evil' is just an unwillingness to engage an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attitude doesn't help anyone."
"In the 'Garnethill' trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they're middle-class - they're just working class because they speak with accents."
"Comics don't work if the story is all in the text and the images are illustrative. It's hard to have enough faith in the artists to allow them to do their job."
"We don't really go in for big family dinners, but Scottish people are famously confrontational. It's a cultural thing, so maybe we don't need to have them to clear the air. Also, traditional family food isn't as nice here so there's no payoff for traveling hundreds of miles."
"I love Mikhail Bulgakov. He is very original and takes the story to unexpected places. I didn't realise political writing could be so funny."