Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward.
And the smell of the library was always the same – the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as ‘the steam of the social soup.’
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character – a living being – within each of my books.
If I did only one thing at a time I’d think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.
I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed.
I never read in bed, only in my study.
I don’t in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I’m not.
I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.
Freud was just a novelist.
As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.
Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.
I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.
The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.
The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of ‘the history play.’ There can be no doubt that Shakespeare’s presentations of ‘Henry V’ and ‘Richard III’ have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.
Oh, I just tend to believe in things when I’m writing them. For instance, when I was writing ‘Doctor Dee,’ I believed in magic. And when I wrote ‘Hawksmoor’ I believed in psychic geography. But as soon as I type the last full stop, I’m back to being a complete blank again.
None of my books has been ever in my head; after they’re finished, they go. It’s like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it’s there then just release it when it’s time to go. There’s a lot of instinct, not planning.
In ‘The Plato Papers’ I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there’s a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.
I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There’s hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London’s texture.