Quotes from Lauren Willig

One of our fundamental human needs is finding our partner that we hope we will stay with for the rest of our lives. You often find the same search in other genres. The mystery novel has a romance subplot. Literary novels often focus on that relationship but do not often end well.

Ever since reading Jean Plaidy's 'Queen in Waiting,' I've felt deep admiration for Caroline of Ansbach.

I'm an eighteenth-century girl at heart. I wouldn't mind being set down in London in 1715, in the midst of all the drama of the Hanoverian succession.

I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

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.

As a friend once pointed out, the crotchety dowagers do tend to get all the best lines. That may be why I have so many of them in my books.

I couldn't make myself write serious; I was surrounded by serious: in monographs, in articles, in my own dissertation prospectus, in the very earnest e-mails of students telling me just why that paper couldn't be in on time, cross their hearts and hope to get an A-minus.

I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week... there's not much room for novels.

There's a horrible stereotype of both the romance writer and the romance reader as somehow undereducated and unprofessional, when in fact there are a number of incredibly well-educated professional women who have chosen to leave their other careers and go into writing romance.

I'm not sure that teaching a Core course is necessarily the best introduction to teaching.

My dear Mrs. Grimstone, sometimes cowardice is merely another word for common sense.

It wasn't the big decisions that set the course of one's life; it was the slow accretion of all the little ones.

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

He] had insisted that inanimate objects couldn't have malignant motivations, but Emma had extensive proof to the contrary.

Colin mustered a perfunctory leer, but his mind was obviously elsewhere. 'Do you know...' he began. I knew many things, but I didn't think he needed to hear the entirety of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales right at just this moment.

Why was it that cheering expressions were invariably so infuriating?

Its nice to know that your common sense stands between me and the grave.

with the complete lack of shame of the extremely deaf and the complete lack of grammar of the extremely inbred.

It hurt to kill a dream, like tearing petals off a rose in full bloom.

It was very hard to rant while accepting a cup of tea.

Think before you speak. Take a deep breath, people suggested. Count to ten. Count sheep. Oh, wait, that was for sleeping. Even in her own head, her tongue ran ahead of her brain. It propelled her into all sorts of absurd situations. Elopements. Scandals. This.

I know historians aren't supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie's Angels. Only better. It made the Pink Carnation's organization look positively humdrum.

Some things worked far better in imagination than reality. In imagination, she was intrepid and resourceful; in reality she wished she were home, wrapped in a quilt.