When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

Rafe asks him, could the king's freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed? Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, one you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.

To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.

I think the monarchy today is. . . mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Those who are made can be unmade.

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