I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting they're dressing the scene they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage I think that lead us from an innocent world of contentment drunkenness and good humor to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

In my opinion I think sarcasm and humor in a song without turning it into a novelty song is really charming.

A novelist is like all mortals more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

There is no happiness in love except at the end of an English novel.