You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.