Top 35 Antonia Fraser Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all. marie antoinette.”

— Antonia Fraser

2. “The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette’s childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!”

— Antonia Fraser

3. “I can’t read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.”

— Antonia Fraser

4. “Mary Queen of Scots was my first love, and that is always something special.”

— Antonia Fraser

5. “Ninety-seven is my lucky number.”

— Antonia Fraser

6. “People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.”

— Antonia Fraser

7. “I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I’ve just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.”

— Antonia Fraser

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8. “My mother, who was quite sharp when I was young, became utterly mild.”

— Antonia Fraser

9. “This time the Empress was supposed to have asked the celebrated healer and pretender to miraculous powers, John Joseph Gassner: “Will my daughter be happy?” His reply was suitably gnomic: “There are crosses for all shoulders.” 3.”

— Antonia Fraser

10. “King Charles II liked women’s company and well as making love to them.”

— Antonia Fraser

11. “Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema.”

— Antonia Fraser

12. “I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle – that is to say nowhere.”

— Antonia Fraser

13. “I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.”

— Antonia Fraser

14. “If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.”

— Antonia Fraser

15. “The real work of destruction had been done long before by satire, libel and rumour; Marie Antoinette had become dehumanized. The actual assault by a body of people inspiring each other with their bloodthirsty frenzy was the culmination of the process, not the start of it.”

— Antonia Fraser

16. “Kings who become prisoners are not far from death.”

— Antonia Fraser

17. “Of course there’s no such thing as a totally objective person, except Almighty God, if she exists.”

— Antonia Fraser

18. “I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.”

— Antonia Fraser

19. “Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.”

— Antonia Fraser

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20. “My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women’s education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.”

— Antonia Fraser

21. “That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.”

— Antonia Fraser

22. “My mother was a politician in my formative years.”

— Antonia Fraser

23. “I hate the only one of my book jackets when I was made up professionally, my hair made into a smooth bell.”

— Antonia Fraser

24. “People cannot help their predilections, although they may conceal them.”

— Antonia Fraser

25. “She saw that supreme dignity – and love – lay in tolerance.”

— Antonia Fraser

26. “I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.”

— Antonia Fraser

27. “I think there’s a tremendous split between people who’ve been through a war and people who haven’t.”

— Antonia Fraser

28. “Like her marriage, Marie Antoinette’s death was a political decision.”

— Antonia Fraser

29. “I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women’s history.”

— Antonia Fraser

30. “The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.”

— Antonia Fraser

31. “It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.”

— Antonia Fraser

32. “I’m very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.”

— Antonia Fraser

33. “It is a fact that, being a quick reader, apart from enabling a person to study good books such as Macaulay and Gibbon, enables a person to read a lot of bad books as well.”

— Antonia Fraser

34. “She might be furious at such things, jealous too on a purely human level; but she would never consider that the position of mistress could or would be converted into that of wife. That to Isabella – or her daughter – was quite unthinkable.”

— Antonia Fraser

35. “I’m glad I was never an heiress.”

— Antonia Fraser

36. “As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.”

— Antonia Fraser

37. “A frequent charge made against “Antoinette” was that she was bathed in the blood of the French people; the truth of it was, of course, exactly the other way round.”

— Antonia Fraser

38. “As ever in a crisis, Marie Antoinette showed herself the forceful one who nonetheless could not bring herself finally to impose her will.”

— Antonia Fraser

39. “Looking without passion is always a good plan where history is concerned. But is it really possible with regard to the career and character of Marie Antoinette?”

— Antonia Fraser