If I did only one thing at a time I'd think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.

I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.