Quotes from Edward Rutherfurd

However much you may fall in love, do not waste that love on a woman who is not considerate in return.

Love might come suddenly, unsought, from a place not looked for, and stay for a while before departing into the distance, to a place where it cannot be reached.

When people are angry, any insult will do; and prejudice is magnified into a cause.

So how would you define a Londoner, then?" Lady Penny asked curiously. "Someone who lives here. It's like the old definition of a cockney: someone who's born within hearing distance of Bow bells. And a foreigner," he added with a grin, "is anyone, Anglo-Saxon or not, who lives outside.

What he needed Gorham to understand - what his son was heir to - the thing that really mattered - was the New Yorkers indomitable spirit

Small wounds are healed by time, but time can only bandage great wounds, which continue to bleed in secret.

It was politics and religion, in van Dyck's private view, that made men dangerous. Trade made them wise.

And he glanced down at Mercy beside him, and saw in her face such radiant goodness, such a calm certainty, that it seemed to him that if he could only be with her all his life, he should know a love, and happiness, and peace that he had never known before.

The fault in his son lay not in his nature, which was honorable, but in his perceptions, which were limited.

For the French army was going to war. In taxis.

In my opinion the best writer of historical novels. He makes you feel, smell, see every thing he describes in all his books. He doesn't only write, he makes you linked images in your mind with his words.

You never know in life. Sometimes people can mean what they say.

Can you do it?' 'Maybe I can, and maybe I can't. But I am going to make MacDuff think that I can. And belief,' said Gabriel Love, with the smile of an angel, 'is a wonderful thing.

I'll be damned if I'm going to miss the overture and finale when I've payed good money for it... You can go, but I'm staying.

The bare, sweeping chalk downs of southern England, familiar today, are not a natural feature of the landscape: they were created by prehistoric man.

You can make money in a small way without politics. But to make big money, you need to buy the legislature. Can't be done otherwise.

I think you should weep, now. It's time.

She was quiet for a moment or two. Then she said: Cruel words are a terrible thing, Quash. Sometimes you regret them. But what's been said cannot be unsaid.

For centuries my father's family lived on Britain's biggest tidal river, the Severn, on which there was a huge trade with the interior, and through the Port of Bristol with America.

Paris. City of love. City of dreams. City of splendor. City of saints and scholars. City of gaiety. Sink of iniquity.

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.

For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background.

I first considered writing 'New York' in 1991. I'd been in the city for a decade, was married to an American wife, and sending my children to New York schools. I was even on the board of a coop building. But I wasn't sure how to organize such complex material, and for many years I put the project aside.

I myself was born beside a river - the Avon in Sarum. So when I first encountered New York's great harbor and the Hudson River as a teenager, and came to understand their historic canal and railroad links to the vast spaces of the Midwest, I felt both the thrill of a new adventure and a deep sense of homecoming.