I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line..

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 ….

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

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes..

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography..

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its m….

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins..

I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo t….

Rafe asks him, could the king's freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed? Look, he says: once you have exhausted the proc….

He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked lik….

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late..

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home..

The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page a….

Every leader operates under the threat of assassination..

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 va….

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, i….

When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative..

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried..

Beneath every history, another history..

Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before..

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