I'm glad I was never an heiress.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.

I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema.

I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle - that is to say nowhere.

Write and keep writing, not because people will like it, but because someone may get a kick out of thrashing your book.

These days, there are angry ghosts all around us, dead from wars, sickness, starvation--and nobody cares. So you say you're under a curse? Well, so what? So's the whole damned world.

If anybody comes into my home and tries to hurt my kids, I've no problem shooting them.

I'm incredibly lucky that my profession allows me to be where I choose, really.

Let us expect that God is going to use us. Let us have courage and go forward, looking to God to do great things.

The living is a species of the dead; and not a very attractive one.

The power of an attitude is amazing

Maybe I'll just be a good aunt.

I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.

You can come from China, Russia, any place, and you can be a New Yorker. You can say what you want to say here, really express yourself.