Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

[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.

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

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