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

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" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "

" Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready. "

" If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to self. When endocrine patterns change, it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another. "

" 'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late. "

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

" Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which would be an overt recognition of the existing state of affairs. "

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

" When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like. "

" I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen. "

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

" Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me. "

" 'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. "

" 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. "

" I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing. "

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

" My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on. "

" When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you. "

" 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. "

" What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don't know which bits are true. "

" When I was a child, there was very little money, so I've always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life. "

" Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds. "

" I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945. "

" I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? "

" The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it. "

" 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. "

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