History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it’s best not to like it too much.
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.
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.
My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can’t remember ever reading a story without judging it.
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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.
Hindsight is the historian’s necessary vice.
History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that’s all you are – a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.
When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.
I’m a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.
I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I’m mad.
I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.