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

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

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

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 vanished by the time your book's ready.

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

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

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

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.

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, if you can only see 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.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

The true nature of man left to himself without restraint is not nobility but savagery.

Comparisons are like rigid fingers—eager to point at a subject but unwilling to grasp it.

Sometimes the darkest challenges, the most difficult lessons, hold the greates gems of light.

I felt as though a large knot of flames had been lit in my stomach, making me feel nauseous and excited all at once

We had a bad court. Got a bad decision, had a court that's been overturned I may be wrong but I think it's 80% of the time.

The hand is the visible part of the brain.

I am in a lot of pain. They say it is more pain than when you have a baby but I don't know as I have not had one. It is not possible.

Enjoy the journey, enjoy every moment, and quit worrying about Winning and losing.

I've been inspired by dreams - I've even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.

I think there's a certain sense of grounding that comes from not being a rich kid from a media-elite school.