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

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

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.

I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.

In the city of Pyongyang, you don't have to look very far to see an image of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung. They love the guy. He is responsible for the wonder that is North Korea.

How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

The quickest and easiest way to screw up your life is to take on too much debt.

I have to give credit to my trainer. He definitely kept me motivated in staying in shape... I've always been naturally curvy, but of course I had to get used to being in the public eye.

Great leadership is not attained by pursuing greatness but by persevering through great tests.

What culture worth the name would deny women the right to safe motherhood? What value system would send young people ignorant into the world, when a little knowledge might save their lives?

That, which has not its alternation of rest, will not last long.

Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth.

If the guy behind the camera is not good, the pictures are bad. It's still you, and it's the same lines and everything, but it doesn't work.