It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.