By the tits of Holy Agnes.
You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn’t remember me. You never even saw me coming.
Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
You mustn’t stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into 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.
Beneath every history, another history.
Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who’d stayed at home.
I’ve got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer’s curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.
You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.
Like every writer, I’m drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
I think it took me half a page of ‘Wolf Hall’ to think: ‘This is the novel I should have been writing all along.’
A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
Memory isn’t a theme; it’s part of the human condition.