I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Beneath every history, another history.

And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn't it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?