I have always had a hard time revising my work as a journalist, which was never much of a problem. You always have editors as backstops. Their job is to perfect your story. Most of them want to be useful.

One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

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.

I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.

Thatcher had broken the miners' union, all but crushed the Labour Party, dramatically cut back the welfare state, even flirted with a poll tax. In the circles I ran in, Reagan was mocked as a childish dolt. Thatcher was despised.

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

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