Art & Creativity Quote by Jeffrey Archer

Archer’s line is less a confession than a piece of political stagecraft: the novelist-politician insisting he’s already living the job, running on pure stamina and monastic focus. “Nineteen hours a day” is the kind of number that dares you to challenge it. It signals virtue through exhaustion, a familiar currency in campaigns where competence is performed as sleep deprivation. The boast also does something sneakier: it inoculates him against the obvious suspicion that he’s dabbling. He isn’t a writer moonlighting in politics; he’s a would-be mayor who has exiled the writer.

The subtext is reputational triage. Archer’s celebrity came with baggage, and writing is the very source of the persona voters might distrust: slick, self-mythologizing, too good with narrative. By promising “I will not write again,” he frames authorship as a temptation he’s willing to renounce for public duty. It’s a theatrical vow of chastity, meant to read as sacrifice.

“Privileged enough” is the softening agent. It flatters the office and, by extension, the electorate: choose me and you’re granting an honor, not indulging ambition. Yet the phrasing can’t hide the transactional logic beneath it. Archer offers a bargain: give me power and I’ll give up the other life. That’s why it works rhetorically and why it’s unsettling. It turns public service into a totalizing identity, implying the job requires not just time but the surrender of competing selves. In a city like London, that promise is both grand and faintly implausible, which is precisely the point.