To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

One of the frustrations of someone like Thomas Cromwell is that, before they step into the light of history, and become extremely well documented, they are not known. A king might be well documented but not everyone.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.