Deborah Harkness

“Smart is, and has always been, sexy.”

“Films are wonderful but they do fix an identity. I can't read 'Pride and Prejudice' anymore, for instance, without imaging Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.”

“People think about history as all grand gestures or significant moments, but the most valuable lesson we can learn is the enduring legacy of the small, meaningful things in life.”

“I realised that today we are very much interested in reading about subjects that would have also interested people in the 1500s: ghosts, demons and things that go bump in the night.”

“As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.”

“After finishing 'The Book of Life,' I needed a bit of a break from the Bishops and de Clermonts. Honestly, I wasn't sure when - or even if! - they would capture all of my attention again.”

“I never had a plan to be a fiction writer. It's something that happened to me. Sometimes I think maybe it was my spectacular mid-life crisis. Some people buy expensive cars, and I wrote a novel.”

“Often, in books, I find female power to be cartoonish - power is a process, an evolution - it has responsibilities. It's not as simple as picking up your lightning bolt and throwing it at someone.”

“Magic provides a way of still having room for possibilities, an unlimited sense of what the world offers. Magic is always there when science is found wanting.”

“I trust my wife's judgement... That's what Philippe says about Granny, just before all hell breaks loose.”

“I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.”

“Cheap wine is defined by its price, and it depends on personal spending limits. So for me, any wine under $10 is cheap.”

“We live in a world where we think the mysterious is retreating farther and farther from our lives and eventually we will know all there is to know. I love the idea that somehow, there are still things that can be magical.”

“I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.”

“Falling in love is really relatively easy compared to staying in love and building a family that lasts.”

“A ma vie de coer entier.Mon debut et ma fin. Se souvenir du passe, et qu'il ya un avenir. My whole heart for my whole life.With an alpha and an omega: my beginning and my end.Remember the past, and that there is a future.”

“I'm entranced by Amanda Lovelace's work. She wrote two wonderful books, 'The Princess Saves Herself in This One' and 'The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One.' You can feel your heart opening because she says things that you thought only you felt.”

“A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show - in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever - is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery.”

“Don't consider painful what's good for you.”

“I'm a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.”