For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the Dark Continent.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.

I hope I will get to novelize my present circumstances at some point. I have some great stories to tell.

History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful too much of it and your genres are colliding.

The professions of novelist and journalist are very separate. As a novelist, you are ultimately working for yourself. Yes, you need the approval of a publisher and an audience, but what is valued in fiction writing - style, individual voice, insight - is scorned by the editor who is combing through your newspaper article.

There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

I have always had a hard time revising my work as a journalist, which was never much of a problem. You always have editors as backstops. Their job is to perfect your story. Most of them want to be useful.

One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually fiction is just better.