Quotes from Deborah Harkness

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 think you can learn a lot from primary sources. 'The Penguin Book of Witches,' which is edited by novelist Katherine Howe, is a wonderful compilation of primary sources about witchcraft.

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.

Often, in books, I find female power to be cartoonish - power is a process, an evolution - it has responsibilities. It's not as simple as picking up your lightning bolt and throwing it at someone.

The king just sits there, moving one square at a time. The queen can move so freely. I suppose I'd rather lose the game than forfeit her freedom.

As a historian, you can only go as far as the evidence will take you.

There is a lot of talk in the academy about the death of the humanities. Based on my readers' response and their interest in history and literature and art, the death of the humanities has been grossly overstated.

I love being outdoors and being with animals, and when you're on a horse, you have to leave your anxieties and worries behind in the barn. It's very therapeutic.

A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show - in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever - is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery.

It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.

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

It was a brutal picture, a tug-of-war between two equal but opposing impulses. It had the ring of truth, however.

Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored.

My niece was very much caught up in the vampire craze for young adults, and she thought having a vampire boyfriend would be a cool thing. What do you do on a first date? The more I thought about it, the more fun I had imagining what you'd serve a vampire for dinner.

In this room we understand why this war might be fought...it's about our common belief that no one has the right to tell two creatures that they cannot love each other--no matter what their species.

Are you smelling me?" After yesterday I suspected that my body was giving him all kinds of information I didn't want him to have. "Don't tempt me," he murmured.

I re-read the books I assign to my students. Each time I do, I learn something new.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

People think about history as all grand gestures or significant moments, but the most valuable lesson we can learn is the enduring legacy of the small, meaningful things in life.