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

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

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

By the tits of Holy Agnes

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

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.