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

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

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

[Margaret Thatcher] is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for "Who's Who," didn't include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent editions, I do not know.

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

He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland and Buzot, as if they were beneath his notice. August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world.

[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.