As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.

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.

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.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema.

I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle - that is to say nowhere.

Security is superstitious. It doesn't exist in nature

Yeah, 'cause you're just another vehicle goin' by and by.

Thus, I've created humour.

Everyone has secrets. Especially me.

The thing about Alzheimer's is that it's... it's sort of like all these little, small deaths along the way, before they actually physically die.

What quick wit is found in sudden straits!

Because whatever I feel inside, it has a place to go. It just saves me over and over and over again.

I grew up reading comic books. Super hero comic books, Archie comic books, horror comic books, you name it.

One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?

I had a great childhood.