God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.

[Margaret Thatcher] said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist.

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.

I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.