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" My first two novels were very black comedies. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "

" Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition. "

Human Condition

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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