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'It’s a monstrous concept,' says the author of rip-roaring, best-selling historical thrillers including Fatherland, Enigma, Pompeii and Conclave. 'I have written about German staff officers, codebreakers, ancient Romans and been inside the mind of a candidate for Pope. That is the pleasure of writing, to inhabit the thought processes of someone else...'If we can only live in our own time, race, gender, sexuality and life experience, then all poetry, all artistic endeavour withers into [nothing]. There would be no point in doing it. I don’t want to write books about myself.'

This is insane. It reduces all future literature to ghettos of time, place, color, sexuality, etc. Can I write about black Civil War soldiers? No, I am not black and didn't live during the Civil War (the first one, anyway.) As a white man, I can only write about white men. If I want to introduce a romantic interest, it would necessarily be homosexual. My first thought was to wonder whether there were enough people who were bonkers to make this happen, but this guy knows more about than I would ever know, and he is alarmed.

It would be funny if he would pull out this bit of dialogue from "A Good As It Gets":

How do you write about women so well?

I think of a man, and take away reason and responsibility.