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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" My first two novels were very black comedies. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Procrastination

" 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. "

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

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

Human Condition

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "