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I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

People who have got to know Western educational methods always claim that the reading of the Classics was a useless waste of time and should be abolished. Such chatter is to be heard from hundreds of people and cannot be stopped. But it is a serious mistake.

As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.

I feel that historical novelists owe it to our readers to try to be as historically accurate as we can with the known facts. Obviously, we have to fill in the blanks. And then in the final analysis, we're drawing upon our own imaginations. But I think that readers need to be able to trust an author.

In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.