If you want to study writing, read Dickens

I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.

I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.

The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.

Longevity conquers scandal every time.

A combination of all that was best in the gladdest days of the departing year.

Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.