Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading.

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

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

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

My first two novels were very black comedies.

My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.

Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.

Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.

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

Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.

The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.

When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

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

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 do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.