My mother was a politician in my formative years.

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.

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.

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.

People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.