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" I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories. "

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

" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "

" 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. "

" What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different. "

" I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.' "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. "

" The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey. "

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

" I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened. "

" For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers. "

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

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

" History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. "