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….

'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..

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….

Beneath every history, another history..

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

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me..

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information..

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect..

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice..

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you..

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it ….

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case..

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, ….

When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order statio….

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like ….

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it..

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds..

What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but w….