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I like reading about the past. I'm definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.

I tend to like to read history - recent history, because I find that much more intriguing than just a writer's imagination.

I consider myself a writer who happens to write about history, rather than a historian. I was an English major in college. What I've learned about history is in the field, so to speak. Going into the archives and working with it directly.

I strive to use references that may still make some kind of sense once our age has passed into history. That robs my writing of a certain connectedness to my time, but potentially might allow it to make sense to people who are not in this time.

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

I've always been fascinated by how the past impacts the present. For the first half of my career as a novelist, I wrote psychological suspense mysteries. I wanted to be a therapist but was told that while I was a fine diagnostician, I would be a terrible therapist because I wanted to solve everyone's problems.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

I don't know if I would say that I'm specifically a history buff. I do find a lot of things fascinating, especially anything that's bizarre or mysterious and unknown and we don't have all the answers for.

I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.

The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.