[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.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

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

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.