I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

A real diamond is never perfect.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.