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Live out of your imagination, not your history.

As storytellers, you're always somehow creating history.

When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

I tend to like to read history - recent history, because I find that much more intriguing than just a writer's imagination.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

So often, we don't realize that the very moments in which we live become our history, our story.

The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.

I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.

As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.