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.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

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

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

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.

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.