Deborah Harkness

“I found a 'lost' manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I's court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee's interest in magic. Of course, it wasn't really lost. It was there, in the catalog.”

“For me, a $20 wine that drinks like a $40 wine in terms of complexity and interest is a value, while a $5 wine that is not very good is not a value at all in my opinion.”

“I took a course on 'Magic, Alchemy, and Astrology' at Mount Holyoke, and it was a whole new awakening for me, a way of thinking about the world primarily in terms of concepts and words rather than mathematical formulas.”

“There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.”

“My ideas about vampires may be romantic, but your attitudes toward women need a major overhaul.”

“The plain truth is that the period I study is the 16th century, and they were absolutely obsessed with witches and spiritual beings.”

“Witches are the kind of more traditional, home and family, craft people - so they're the ones who are making things; crocheting shawls and things like that. But then they also have that slightly confident, dangerous, edge. I always see them as having very extreme hair, either amazingly beautiful straight hair or kind of wild.”

“All that children need is love, a grown-up to take responsibility for them, and a soft place to land.”

“I absolutely love Dorothy Dunnett's 'House of Niccolo' series and the 'Lymond Chronicles.' They are so detailed.”

“I became a teacher because I wanted to make a difference in people's lives.”

“After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don't really know what you're doing.”

“I am so thrilled to carve out a few minutes to write that I grab it whenever I can.”

“We would all be incredibly boring to a vampire who is 400, 500 years old.”

“If you truly love someone, you will cherish what they despise most about themselves" - Fernando Conclaves”