Deborah Harkness

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

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

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. ”

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. ”

The occult sciences were simply ancient technologies for making the occult or unseen manifest in the world - whether that was the influence of the stars and planets, the mysterious meanings of lines inscribed in your palm, or forms of action at a distance like magic and spells. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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