Most of my stories have some basis in fact.

There is no point in asking a man a question until you have established whether he has any reason to lie to you.

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

I went and looked at one of these great cathedrals one day, and I was blown away by it. From there I became interested in how cathedrals were built, and from there I became interested in the society that built the medieval cathedral. It occurred to me at some point that the story of the building of a cathedral could be a great popular novel.

What news? There's nothing to tell. I'm a nun.

There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.

I enjoy learning technical details.