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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity. "

French Revolution

" 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. "

" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "

" The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them. "

" When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing comes from that territory of being invalidated. But I had a sense of purpose, too. I wanted to stop apologising for my health, and I thought I might do some good. "

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

" 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. "

" Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you. "

Procrastination

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

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

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

" 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'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. "