Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
To be the outsider is actually a great thing in England.
London has always moved and surprised me, reinventing itself in ways both fresh and familiar. It's a contrary, complex and creative city, an anarchist of a thousand faces - fickle and unfailing, tender and bleak, ambitious and callous.
Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.
I remember coming back to the U.K. after spending five months in Charlotte for 'Homeland,' and I just found myself just wandering around London. There's nothing like it - the buildings, the architecture, the sense of history, the sense of culture - there really is nothing like it.
I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.
By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.
It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.
London is a modern Babylon.
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.