You can only do the best you can in the minute that you're doing it.

Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.

I had no intention of providing any answers or solutions, because you'd only look a fool, but I did want to talk about what it's like to be in a state where you're wondering. And perhaps I was also receptive to the fact I was entering middle age and those thoughts come - to pretend that they don't come is just crazy.

The stuff that I have perhaps become known for that's based on fact, and English statesmen shouting at each other all the time, doesn't entirely represent who I am. I am not a politics wonk.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable, rather than its literal narrative.

If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?