If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

The more facts I can have, the better. I can operate very nicely between them, but I am not very good at making things up. I am not sure how ethical it is.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

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

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.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.