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.

I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.

Never stop learning. Never stop growing.

I hate and love. And why, perhaps you’ll ask. I don’t know: but I feel, and I’m tormented.

I really don't spend any time on the Internet, so I guess I live a little under a rock in that respect.

Adam and Eve ate the first vitamins, including the package.

No one teaches you how to walk away from someone who you know loves you. NO one teaches you how to say good-bye.

We don't know how to identify intelligence over interstellar distances, so what we do instead is use technology for a proxy.

Softball isn't just a game it's away of life.

If something is wrong with you, hate someone else for it

The opponents of perestroika had suffered a defeat, and then they organized the coup.

Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.