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

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

To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.

Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

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

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.