Life is not a dress rehearsal.

So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.