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

You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

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

Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.

At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.