Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

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

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.