“Such kindness wasn't a gift but a goad, scraping against one's skin like a yoke of thorns. She would have preferred him stiff, defensive, even offensive.”

“Such kindness wasn't a gift but a goad, scraping against one's skin like a yoke of thorns. She would have preferred him stiff, defensive, even offensive.”

“Amy wondered if Bonaparte could declare war on Miss Gwen alone without breaking his peace with England”

“Say what you will about Queen Eleanor, she was a savvy, quick-witted woman who made her mark on history. And as the founder of the Courts of Love, what better patron monarch could there be for a romantic novelist?”

“I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.”

“My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way.”

“Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.”

“Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.”

“But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.”

“I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words.”

“Turning to Turnip, Miss Dempsey said, 'Do you think?'. 'As little as I can,' Turnip replied honestly.”

“It's the exile's dilemma. The home they yearn for is never the home to which they return. If they return.”