I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

[Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper.