Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" When I was 6, a family friend gave me E.L. Konigsburg's 'A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver' and launched me on a full-blown Eleanor obsession. I wanted to ride off on Crusade, to launch a thousand troubadour songs, to marry a king - and then jilt him and marry another. "

Related Quotes:

" I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book. "

Lauren Willig

Book

Lit

Mystery

" Ever since reading Jean Plaidy's 'Queen in Waiting,' I've felt deep admiration for Caroline of Ansbach. "

" My official field was Tudor-Stuart England; I also considered myself reasonably competent when it came to Renaissance and Reformation Europe. "

" As a friend once pointed out, the crotchety dowagers do tend to get all the best lines. That may be why I have so many of them in my books. "

" My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way. "

" I've had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn't a romance - with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader's expectations going into the story, and that's very hard to predict person to person. "

" I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went. "

" Did I invent anything? I don't think so, not really. But if I've helped make history fun... then my work here is done. "

" Say what you will about Queen Eleanor, she was a savvy, quick-witted woman who made her mark on history. And as the founder of the Courts of Love, what better patron monarch could there be for a romantic novelist? "

" Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the 'mot juste.' "

" I couldn't make myself write serious; I was surrounded by serious: in monographs, in articles, in my own dissertation prospectus, in the very earnest e-mails of students telling me just why that paper couldn't be in on time, cross their hearts and hope to get an A-minus. "

Lauren Willig

Serious

Time

" I think sex is a very minor part of most romance novels. "

" I tend to navigate by indirection, meaning that most of the major things in my life have happened when I've been thinking about something else. "

" My books fall in the wobbly middle between historical fiction and historical romance. "

" If I stay in academia, I might end up going someplace random. "

Lauren Willig

Going

Academia

" There's a horrible stereotype of both the romance writer and the romance reader as somehow undereducated and unprofessional, when in fact there are a number of incredibly well-educated professional women who have chosen to leave their other careers and go into writing romance. "

" When I'm in heavy-duty writing mode, there's something great about reading a series. Soothing, but not distracting too much. "

" Iris Johansen's lovers weathered the sack of city states and the vagaries of the French Revolution; Judith McNaught's heroines endured amnesia, social ostracism and misunderstandings so big they deserved their own ZIP code. "

" The minimum I need is six months to allow for dithering, procrastination and the research. The research times varies from book to book; some are faster because they're based off resources I have at my disposal. "

" I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week... there's not much room for novels. "

" Romance tends to be the whipping boy of genre fiction. "

" I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars. "

" I'm an eighteenth-century girl at heart. I wouldn't mind being set down in London in 1715, in the midst of all the drama of the Hanoverian succession. "

" People who would never sneer at sci-fi and murder mysteries have no trouble damning the whole romance genre without reading one. "

" Every young girl wants to be a princess. Then, when you find a real-life one, it's very easy to imagine yourself in that role. "

" I'm not sure that teaching a Core course is necessarily the best introduction to teaching. "