For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

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

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.