I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.

He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?

To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.

He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland and Buzot, as if they were beneath his notice. August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world.

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.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.