Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.

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.

My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.