Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

This relentless bonhomie of yours, I knew it would wear out in the end. It is a coin that has changed hands so often. And now the small silver is worn out and we see the base metal.

Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I think it would save time and work if all the interested parties came to the council, including foreign ambassadors. The proceedings leak out anyway, and to save them mishearing and misconstruing they might as well hear everything at first hand.

If your going to be ugly it is well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.

If kings do not see you, they forget you. Even though nothing in the realm is done without you, kings think they do it all themselves.

I had read all the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and gray with exhaustion.

He would have explained, if he’d known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, “I found an easier way to be.

Lying gives him a deep and subtle pleasure, so deep and subtle he does not know he is lying; he thinks he is the most truthful of princes.

One of the French lords says, “To lose gracefully is an art that every gentleman cultivates.” “I hope to cultivate it too,” he says. “If you see an example I might follow, please point it out.

Martyr More,’ he says. ‘The word is in Rome that he and Fisher are to be made saints.