If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible..

And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief….

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only..

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated descr….

[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale..

It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator..

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel..

[Margaret Thatcher] is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for "Who's Who," didn't include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent….

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian..

People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with..

One of the ideals [Margaret Thatcher] grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, shor….

Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the proce….

[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me..

If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative..

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography..

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..

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition..

It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to ma….

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

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way..