The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country

I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.

It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.