I am a museum curator when I am not on the television and in our collection at Kensington Palace we have a book like Marie Antoinette's, which belonged to the daughters of George III.
I've always being interested in clothes - and I'm also the curator of a significant dress collection with 12,000 objects in it - the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace.
Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman was one of those books I read in my mid-twenties that was life-changing. I think I had a very black-and-white view of Marie Antoinette before, but in reading that book, I developed a lot of empathy for her. She was just caught up in history. There was no place for a woman to do anything at that time anyway.
I am not nostalgic for the past. And for me, being a museum curator was a childhood dream.
I never really thought about how when I look at the moon it;s the same moon as Shakespeare and Marie Antoinette and George Washington and Cleopatra looked at.
I am making a collection of the things my opponents have found me to be and, when this election is over, I am going to open a museum and put them on display.
My name is George Smoot III, and I am smarter than a fifth-grader.
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!
One of the many pleasures of 'Versailles' is the way in which it seems to emanate not only from the vexed inner being of Marie Antoinette but from the interstices between what we imagine of her and what she was.
I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all. marie antoinette
Dreams weigh nothing. - Marie Antoinette
I remember seeing 'The Bling Ring' in cinemas and loved it - it was so cool. And 'Marie Antoinette' - I watched that when I was, like, nine or something. I thought it was the best thing ever.
Compared to Imelda Marcos, Marie Antoinette was a bag lady.
The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.
I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on in Marie Antoinette's life.
'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.
In times of crisis, it is of the utmost importance that one does not lose her head. Marie Antoinette