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" I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets. "

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" 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. "

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

" Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things. "

" Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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