Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

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

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

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

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.