Top 14 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Rutherfurd

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.

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.

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

All of my career has been an attempt to educate myself and get paid for it.

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.

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.

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.

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

I descend from both Philadelphia Quakers and Carolina colonists whose families were separated by the Revolutionary War. That helped give me insight into the agony of Patriots who, until the British government denied their claims, had always, like Ben Franklin himself, thought of themselves as free-born Englishmen.

as I said,I believe in fate.Things happen as they are meant to be.We just have to recognize our destiny.

You can do what you like, sir, but I'll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.

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.

All empires become arrogant. It is their nature.

Don't you know that there's another bubble as well An expectations bubble. Bigger houses private planes yachts ...... stupid salaries and bonuses. People come to desire these things and expect them. But the expectations bubble will burst as well as all bubbles do. Come to my gallery and I will sell you beautiful things at a more reasonable price. But the point is that they will have value. Things of real beauty things of the spirit.