I hate the only one of my book jackets when I was made up professionally, my hair made into a smooth bell.

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.

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.

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

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.

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