I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless

Sometimes during a ballet I'll look around and see all these rows of intent faces, concentrating on this beautiful thing up on the stage.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

There's a feeling about it. You feel almost like a cabinetmaker, laying planks. There's a real feeling when you know you're getting it right. It's a physical feeling.

Whenever I go to work I wear a jacket and a tie, because I'm inherently quite lazy, and my books take so long to do, and my publishers don't bug me, so it's so easy to fool yourself into thinking you're working harder than you really are.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives

You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.