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

I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.

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.

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

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

Statistically, you don't have much chance of becoming president if you're not tall and fairly handsome or at least conventional-looking.

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