[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.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

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

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

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.

The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.