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

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

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.