I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

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

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

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

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.