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

It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.

For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

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