There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

The professions of novelist and journalist are very separate. As a novelist, you are ultimately working for yourself. Yes, you need the approval of a publisher and an audience, but what is valued in fiction writing - style, individual voice, insight - is scorned by the editor who is combing through your newspaper article.

There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually fiction is just better.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.

History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.