What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.

England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

I needed my stuff around me, and in that little cocoon I felt good, and I could work.