Most romances aren't swept aside by big historical events. Most romances in the history of the world fall apart because of other, smaller happenings. History can sometimes be in the background, the thing which instead of rupturing your life merely irritates you by pressing itself now and then into the foreground.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick.

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.