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

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

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.

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

Her imperturbable self-confidence (Duchesse de Maine) caused Madame de Stael to write that the Duchesse believed in herself the same way she believed in God, without explanation or discussion.

I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all. marie antoinette