[Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper..

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad..

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..

What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, al….

It was a very funny conference. I knew [Christopher Hitchens] before that. He had always been a good angel to me. He once stole a phrase from me that….

For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move….

I believe this was [Margaret Thatcher] estimate of the voter: "These people are so stupid that they will vote for me because they think I know how to….

I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did..

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming..

If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you….

To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature..

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing..

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England..

By the tits of Holy Agnes.

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 accom….

I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set..

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put in….

When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do..

If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back..

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires..

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorro….