I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.

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.

For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.