“Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn - to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise...”

“Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path. ... Male strength -- the desire to be cradled again? ... I'd love someone to pick me up and carry me off. Frightening. Lindsay assures me I'd star...”

“I don't have technique because I never learnt any.”

“Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.”

“Quick dinner with ... Ang [Lee] and his wife Jane who's visiting with the children for a while. We talked about her work as a microbiologist and the behaviour of the epithingalingie under the influ...”

“I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.”

“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”

“Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

“Logically, you should go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a good degree, go into the workplace, then work hard and be happy. The only problem is that happiness isn't logical.”

“You are the cause of your suffering. That means that you alone have the power to change it.”