Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.

Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.