Hilary Mantel

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

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

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

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.

It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical.

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

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

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