Quotes by Antonia Fraser

• It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
• 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.
• I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.
• I don't like it, but this afternoon I've told myself I am going to go and get a dress.
• I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.
• I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
• I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.
• I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on in Marie Antoinette's life.
• I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.
• I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.
• I'm glad I was never an heiress.
• After Mary Queen of Scots, I turned to the farthest subject possible: Cromwell.
• If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.
• That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.
• King Charles II liked women's company and well as making love to them.
• 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.
• Mary Queen of Scots was my first love, and that is always something special.
• 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.
• My mother was a politician in my formative years.
• My mother, who was quite sharp when I was young, became utterly mild.
• Ninety-seven is my lucky number.
• Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema.
• People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.
• The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.
• We are privileged. There are poor people out there. We must to do something to make them privileged.
• I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.
• 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!