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.

Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.

I hope I will get to novelize my present circumstances at some point. I have some great stories to tell.

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.

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 was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

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