Mary Queen of Scots was my first love, and that is always something special.

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

If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.

We are privileged. There are poor people out there. We must to do something to make them privileged.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

After Mary Queen of Scots, I turned to the farthest subject possible: Cromwell.

Mary Queen of Scots was my first love, and that is always something special.

Ninety-seven is my lucky number.

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

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!

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

My mother was a politician in my formative years.

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

I don't like it, but this afternoon I've told myself I am going to go and get a dress.

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'm glad I was never an heiress.

People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.

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.

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

I hate the only one of my book jackets when I was made up professionally, my hair made into a smooth bell.

I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on in Marie Antoinette's life.

My mother, who was quite sharp when I was young, became utterly mild.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

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

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

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.

King Charles II liked women's company and well as making love to them.

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

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body's way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn't meant to be.

Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.

My first figure was a SLAYER eagle. And the dragons and the tribals are all I have got.

We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

But in the first Gulf war the United Kingdom was not under any threat from Iraq, and is still less so in the second one. Then there is no justification for obstructing freedom of information, particularly as nations have a right to know what their soldiers are being used for.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

The first thing you do when you get out to center field is put up your finger and check the wind chill factor.

Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.