Author

A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show - in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever - is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery.

From Deborah Harkness

Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored.

From Deborah Harkness

My niece was very much caught up in the vampire craze for young adults, and she thought having a vampire boyfriend would be a cool thing. What do you do on a first date? The more I thought about it, the more fun I had imagining what you'd serve a vampire for dinner.

From Deborah Harkness

The plain truth is that the period I study is the 16th century, and they were absolutely obsessed with witches and spiritual beings.

From Deborah Harkness

I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.

From Deborah Harkness

I'm a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.

From Deborah Harkness

Witches are the kind of more traditional, home and family, craft people - so they're the ones who are making things; crocheting shawls and things like that. But then they also have that slightly confident, dangerous, edge. I always see them as having very extreme hair, either amazingly beautiful straight hair or kind of wild.

From Deborah Harkness

There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.

From Deborah Harkness

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

From Deborah Harkness

I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.

From Deborah Harkness

Deborah Harkness

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