There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].

Beneath every history, another history.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

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.

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

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.