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

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.