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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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

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

" Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this. "

" 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. "

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

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

Human Condition

" Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were? "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "

" When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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