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.

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

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.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.