"Backbenchers are devalued. Their role is diminished. No-one even knows who they are unless they turn up on the front page of a newspaper because the taxpayer has been footing the bill for their duck house."

“I've been keeping a diary since I was about 11. If you don't keep a diary everything washes away. And you can live everything three times: you live it when you live it, you live it when you write it down, and you live it a third time when you re-read it. Though I have to say rereading my diary for publication was a depressing experience. You shouldn't look back.”

“I get to my desk at eight in the morning and I leave it at seven in the evening and I just work away. I'm a work machine.”

“It's different now, it's different now. Now I can speak the truth. I can tell you that the one thing I really, really couldn't bear when I was an MP were my constituents. Let's face it: the people have contempt for the politicians; it is as nothing to the contempt we have for you. All over this country, there are politicians on their way to the Labour Party conference, coming away from the LibDem one, getting ready to go to the Conservative one, thinking "God, at last he's said it. He's said what we all feel, that happiness is the constituency in the rear-view mirror.”

“I had to pull about twenty pieces of broken glass out of my hand using tweezers and antiseptic cream. I'm never going to have a game of arm wrestling with Michael Howard again.”

“One of the interesting things about writing a play is that when you've finished it you have to give it away.”

“If you'd spent your life being called "Gyles Brandreth", you would crawl across broken glass to achieve the bliss, the simplicity, the purity, the joy of simply being called "Bob.”