It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

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

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.