The value that I found in interviewing was for an educational experience, just to know that history itself is subjective, that you can't say, "It happened." Do the best you can with what you think happened, but a lot of other people are going to see it happening differently.

I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.

I'd like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I'm writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact.

I've chosen to be a commentator and an analyzer of politics, rather than an actual doer of it. I think it could have gone the other way, but I'm not sorry that it didn't, because this made it easier to be home with my kids and to spend time with them. Writing you can do right in your house. You don't have to go anywhere.

When you are an historian, there's probably nothing that matters more than to be recognized by your colleagues in your own profession. I was lucky enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for History. I had to give a talk right after that to some young people. The most important thing to tell them, I think, is that you can't ever know that it's going to turn out that way.

I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.

People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.