One thing I like about historical fiction is that I'm not constantly focusing on me, or people like me; you're obliged to concentrate on lives that are completely other than your own.
I know there is something out there, and like most people, I tend to believe in it more when things go bad. But I'm not like Shirley MacLaine, who probably believes we were past lovers in another life.
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
Obviously when it comes to the question of telling stories about other people's lives in a situation as political as South Africa, you get to be political.
What I love is dropping into someone else's life and exploring it.
And that's what I really love, is finding a script and fantasizing and going to a different world and kind of portraying a character that is interesting. Because other lives interest us, that's why we read magazines like 'People' and try and fascinate and drool over what other people are doing.
This is what we bear, I thought, the nearness of other lives.
Other heights in other lives, God willing.
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
The pleasure of reading biography, like that of reading letters, derives from the universal hunger to penetrate other lives.
