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The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn't have to change a word.

My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

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

I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.

I wrote a lot in study hall to while away the hours.

I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules.

I didn't know that there were many rules in music when I first started writing.

I had three weeks of prep on 'Wolfman,' a ridiculously inadequate amount of time to try to bring together the fractured and scattered pieces of the production. I had taken the job mostly because I had a cash flow problem, the only time in my career I've ever let finances enter into the decision process.

Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.