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

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.

I was utilized because I have a certain face that works well in cinema, and I'm used to making myself look as good as possible.

The whole aspect of cinema and film festivals should be a moment to come together and celebrate art and humanity. It would be a shame if there was such a divide.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

I've been very lucky in my long life. On three continents, in diverse cultures, through happy moments, not-so-happy moments, and moments as marvelous as this one, I've had the privilege of working with the cinema's greatest masters.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

I don't go to the cinema much.

Foreign capital to build new cinemas will help modernize China's aging cinema infrastructure, attract Chinese consumers back into cinemas, and increase demand for U.S. films.

I went to the Tokyo Film Festival in Japan because I love Japanese cinema.

No, I like today's cinema a lot. But I've spent so many decades only making movies. There's so much that I still want to do. Like, live. It's only up to me.

Of course the French are making very credible movies and it is still one of the greatest nations in terms of world cinema but the real problem is the decay in film criticism.

Cinema will always have an important role to play in society.

I hate that people think going to the theatre is a special occasion. I wish people would treat it as normally as going to the cinema.

I really love sort of classical cinema where people were telling stories with very little dialogue, and people were using the camera in a really interesting way.

But I think that the spirit of protectionism would be the grave of European cinema. You cannot protect something by building a fence around it and thinking that this will help it survive.

I prefer ordinary girls - you know, college students, waitresses, that sort of thing. Most of the girls I go out with are just good friends. Just because I go out to the cinema with a girl, it doesn't mean we are dating.

Well, you cannot think of cinema now, and you cannot think of cinema in the UK and not place Chaplin in the most extraordinary elevated context, if there can be such a thing, in that he was a genius, he was unique.

If a violent act towards a woman takes place, and the inspiration for that act is violence in cinema, the inspiration for that act would have come from somewhere else if movies didn't exist.

Cinema is still a very young art form with extraordinary techniques and very impressive special effects but sometimes it seems the soul has been taken out of things.