Where Do Ideas Come From? My Apprenticeship as a Novelist

I often get asked “Where do you get your ideas from?” Actually, I waited for years for my first good idea to come along. Finally, when I was about fifty, I stumbled across the story of Veronica Franco, a poet and “intellectual courtesan” in 16th-century Venice . . . Were there any courtesans in papal Avignon, a city equal in splendour to Venice? . . . read more