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" As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way. "

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" I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished. "

" I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only. "

" But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it. "

" Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were? "

" For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much. "

" The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth. "

" Sometimes people ask, 'Does writing make you happy?' But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled. "

" There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process. "

" In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill. "

" Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy. "

" Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness. "

" Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis. "

" Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties. "

" Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect. "

" Writers displace their anxiety on to the tools of the trade. It's better to say that you haven't got the right pencil than to say you can't write, or to blame your computer for losing your chapter than face up to your feeling that it's better lost. "

" If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. "

" I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information. "

" I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case. "

" History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him. "

" Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading. "

" Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns. "

" I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. "

" It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical. "

" I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad. "

" If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible. "

" When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen. "

" It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases. "

" Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it. "

" I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line. "

" Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up. "