America's health care system is in crisis precisely because we systematically neglect wellness and prevention.

Let's face it, in America today we don't have a health care system, we have a sick care system.

Stem cell research holds enormous promise for easing human suffering, and federal support is critical to its success.

The Gulf War was like teenage sex. We got in too soon and out too soon.

The President must stop gambling with taxpayers' money and get the country back on the path of fiscal sanity.

While President Bush's tax give-aways for the rich are pushing us further into debt, he compensates by increasing the out-of-pocket costs to our veterans.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.