To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.

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

I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.