Lauren Willig quotes

Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt. (Lauren Willig)
Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for. View quote
Lauren Willig
It is a truth universally acknowledged that one only comes up with clever, cutting remarks long after the other party is happily slumbering away. View quote
Lauren Willig
Tell them I have the headache--no, the plague! I need something nice and contagious. View quote
Lauren Willig
There's nothing so attractive as a blank slate. Take one attractive man, slap on a thick coat of daydream, and voila, the perfect man. With absolutely no resemblance to reality. View quote
Lauren Willig
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. View quote
Lauren Willig
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. View quote
Lauren Willig
But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven. View quote
Lauren Willig
There is, I have heard, a little thing called sunrise, in which the sun reverses the process we all viewed the night before. You might assume such a thing as mythical as those beasts that guard the corners of the earth, but I have it on the finest authority, and have, indeed, from time to time, regarded it with my own eyes. View quote
Lauren Willig
They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next. View quote
Lauren Willig
Amazing what the application of a knitting needle could do for one's manners. (Lauren Willig)
Love doesn't attack; it infiltrates. View quote
Lauren Willig
It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better. View quote
Lauren Willig
I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I'll still be questing after just that right combination of words. View quote
Lauren Willig
It was lovely to see cynicism in one so young. It positively restored his faith in human nature. View quote
Lauren Willig
The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language. View quote
Lauren Willig
They were close enough that he could feel the hurried beat of her heart. He could feel Charlotte's indecision in every word she didn't say and every move she didn't make. She was tense with uncertainty, quivering with irresolution. She might not be leaning into him, but she wasn't pulling away, either. View quote
Lauren Willig
Gentlemen do so appreciate a nicely trimmed décolletage. View quote
Lauren Willig
I think sex is a very minor part of most romance novels. View quote
Lauren Willig
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. View quote
Lauren Willig
My books fall in the wobbly middle between historical fiction and historical romance. (Lauren Willig)
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. View quote
Lauren Willig
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. View quote
Lauren Willig
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. View quote
Lauren Willig
One of our fundamental human needs is finding our partner that we hope we will stay with for the rest of our lives. You often find the same search in other genres. The mystery novel has a romance subplot. Literary novels often focus on that relationship but do not often end well. View quote
Lauren Willig