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

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

[Margaret Thatcher] said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist.

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.