When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

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.