I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.

I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.