Quotes from Lauren Willig

Swooning solves nothing.

Oh, no," said Mr. Fitzhugh blithely, immune to nuance. "We're here to see the ruins." Lady Vaughn looked innocently up at her husband. "Isn't that what you said, Vaughn?

I'll believe it when I see it, missy. Snakes don't change their scales, no matter how many times he"—Miss Gwen poked her sword parasol in the Gardener's general direction—"changes his name. What has it been? Four names so far? Five? It's getting hard to keep track. Make up your mind already.

embroidered Louis XV chair, legs crossed at the

A Frenchman, judging from the black turtleneck and the fact that his armpit was a deodorant-free zone.

The food of love isn't music. It's grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches.

Strange, that the thought of him still evoked such bitterness in her. She had thought death would have conquered that, transmuting bitterness to grief and recriminations to guilt. For a time it had. But like an alchemist's experiments, the transformation had proved illusory.

Romance tends to be the whipping boy of genre fiction.

'Purple Plumeria' I dithered over for months and then wrote the whole thing between the beginning of July and end of August. The dithering and procrastination time was three times the writing times.

Say what you will about Queen Eleanor, she was a savvy, quick-witted woman who made her mark on history. And as the founder of the Courts of Love, what better patron monarch could there be for a romantic novelist?

My books fall in the wobbly middle between historical fiction and historical romance.

When I was 6, a family friend gave me E.L. Konigsburg's 'A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver' and launched me on a full-blown Eleanor obsession. I wanted to ride off on Crusade, to launch a thousand troubadour songs, to marry a king - and then jilt him and marry another.

I've had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn't a romance - with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader's expectations going into the story, and that's very hard to predict person to person.

My official field was Tudor-Stuart England; I also considered myself reasonably competent when it came to Renaissance and Reformation Europe.

I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.

My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way.

Love doesn't attack; it infiltrates.

Did I invent anything? I don't think so, not really. But if I've helped make history fun... then my work here is done.

Every young girl wants to be a princess. Then, when you find a real-life one, it's very easy to imagine yourself in that role.

People who would never sneer at sci-fi and murder mysteries have no trouble damning the whole romance genre without reading one.

If I stay in academia, I might end up going someplace random.

Iris Johansen's lovers weathered the sack of city states and the vagaries of the French Revolution; Judith McNaught's heroines endured amnesia, social ostracism and misunderstandings so big they deserved their own ZIP code.

I tend to navigate by indirection, meaning that most of the major things in my life have happened when I've been thinking about something else.

When I'm in heavy-duty writing mode, there's something great about reading a series. Soothing, but not distracting too much.