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

[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.

[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.

If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

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

In order to successfully impersonate men, the woman [Margaret Thatcher] launched a war.