I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

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.

She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen.

He knows nothing

Don’t be so vain to think that you ruined me, that you wrecked me, destroyed me.I am the only one who has the power to do that.—Amanda Helm,

When did we all become fluent in this language that none of us wanted to learn?

It is you!" the man exclaimed. "We thought you weren't coming for another week!" "Ashe," Sarene mumbled, "who is this lunatic and what does he want with me?

Like italics and hyphens, quotation marks are to be used as sparingly as possible. They should light the way, not darken it.

Just because you married doesn't mean you're not an individual person with your own wants and desires and needs.

Simón Bolívar is the only person in history to be exiled from a country named after him.

It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on earth. It's an interesting place to be. I recommend it.

Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.