Top 36 Quotes & Sayings by Antonia Fraser

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.

I'm glad I was never an heiress.

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

My mother, who was quite sharp when I was young, became utterly mild.

I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

Mary Queen of Scots was my first love, and that is always something special.

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.

I hate the only one of my book jackets when I was made up professionally, my hair made into a smooth bell.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.

Ninety-seven is my lucky number.

We are privileged. There are poor people out there. We must to do something to make them privileged.

People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.

I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.

I don't like it, but this afternoon I've told myself I am going to go and get a dress.

King Charles II liked women's company and well as making love to them.

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

After Mary Queen of Scots, I turned to the farthest subject possible: Cromwell.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

My mother was a politician in my formative years.

I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on in Marie Antoinette's life.

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.

I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle - that is to say nowhere.

I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.

I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all. marie antoinette

Her imperturbable self-confidence (Duchesse de Maine) caused Madame de Stael to write that the Duchesse believed in herself the same way she believed in God, without explanation or discussion.

As the Dauphine stepped out of her carriage on to the ceremonial carpet that had been laid down, it was the Duc de Choiseul who was given the privilege of the first salute. Presented with the Duc by Prince Starhemberg, Marie Antoinette exclaimed: 'I shall never forget that you are responsible for my happiness!

Of course there's no such thing as a totally objective person, except Almighty God, if she exists.