A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

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.

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