When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.

Motherhood is always an act of courage.

My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

The royal power is the grace to act right.

To make a decision, all you need is authority. To make a good decision, you also need knowledge, experience, and insight.

Madness is loving the unsolvable puzzle of your soul and replacing the lost pieces with my own.

Greater personal choice, individually tailored services, stronger local accountability, greater efficiency - these are all central to the new direction of travel we have set for our public services.

The students always, always surprise me.

Impossibility is a log thrown on the fires of love.

The environment does not determine man's culture; it merely sets the outer limits and at the same time offers opportunities.

If you look at America now as a giant ship, before we can turn it around and go the other way, we've got to stop. This has been our problem all along. We haven't really advanced anything we believe.

I am willing to do whatever is necessary to succeed.

I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by bats.