Deborah Harkness Quotes - BrainyQuote

American - Novelist Born: 1965

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.

Deborah Harkness

Beautiful Family Home People

There is a lot of talk in the academy about the death of the humanities. Based on my readers' response and their interest in history and literature and art, the death of the humanities has been grossly overstated.

Deborah Harkness

Death Art History Literature

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.

Deborah Harkness

Believe World Negative Reading

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.

Deborah Harkness

Cool You Dinner Fun

Magic provides a way of still having room for possibilities, an unlimited sense of what the world offers. Magic is always there when science is found wanting.

Deborah Harkness

Science World Way Magic

We live in a world where we think the mysterious is retreating farther and farther from our lives and eventually we will know all there is to know. I love the idea that somehow, there are still things that can be magical.

Deborah Harkness

Love World Think Live

I'm entranced by Amanda Lovelace's work. She wrote two wonderful books, 'The Princess Saves Herself in This One' and 'The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One.' You can feel your heart opening because she says things that you thought only you felt.

Deborah Harkness

Work Heart You Feel

I found a 'lost' manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I's court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee's interest in magic. Of course, it wasn't really lost. It was there, in the catalog.

Deborah Harkness

Queen Library Magic Book

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.

Deborah Harkness

Time Mystery Thought Bored

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

Deborah Harkness

Truth Spiritual Truth Is Study

Top 10
Deborah Harkness
Quotes

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.

Deborah Harkness

Love Time People Long

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

Deborah Harkness

Work Good Magic Studying

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.

Deborah Harkness

Death Women Literature Own

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

Deborah Harkness

Appreciation World Literature More

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.

Deborah Harkness

Love Hope Reading Generation

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.

Deborah Harkness

Love History Long Window

I realised that today we are very much interested in reading about subjects that would have also interested people in the 1500s: ghosts, demons and things that go bump in the night.

Deborah Harkness

Today People Night Demons

I'm a professional non-fiction reader, that's what I do. But in my 20s we had our own vampire and witch moment, courtesy of Anne Rice, whose books I read and loved.

Deborah Harkness

Moment Loved Professional Own

Films are wonderful but they do fix an identity. I can't read 'Pride and Prejudice' anymore, for instance, without imaging Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.

Deborah Harkness

Identity Pride Prejudice Without

I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.

Deborah Harkness

Science People Research Magic

I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.

Deborah Harkness

Details Some Historical Discovery

Cheap wine is defined by its price, and it depends on personal spending limits. So for me, any wine under $10 is cheap.

Deborah Harkness

Me Limits Wine Price

For me, a $20 wine that drinks like a $40 wine in terms of complexity and interest is a value, while a $5 wine that is not very good is not a value at all in my opinion.

Deborah Harkness

Good Me Value Wine

The occult sciences were simply ancient technologies for making the occult or unseen manifest in the world - whether that was the influence of the stars and planets, the mysterious meanings of lines inscribed in your palm, or forms of action at a distance like magic and spells.

Deborah Harkness

Stars World Magic Action

I love being outdoors and being with animals, and when you're on a horse, you have to leave your anxieties and worries behind in the barn. It's very therapeutic.

Deborah Harkness

Love You Horse Behind

I'm definitely a seat-of-the-pants writer.

Deborah Harkness

Writer Definitely

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