Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

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

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Wearing colourful eyeliner in a graphic shape is the epitome of make-up as an accessory.

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