Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

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

What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.