“Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of peoples imagination.”

“Its very silly, she said, but I go on with it in spite of myself. Im afraid Im too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I cant read it.”

“When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement. ”

“I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, Ah me! I wish I were a widow! Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be. With her d...”

“Madness is freedom and some may only perceive its Insanity.”

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, runningthat's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the b...”

“Doing what you love is freedom. Loving what you do is happiness.”

“[H]iding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn't make you nice, it just makes you a liar.”

“Love is honesty. Love is a mutual respect for one another.”

“The fact that Ridge has been honest in his conversations with me is not something he did wrong. The fact that he has feelings for me also isnt wrong, when you know exactly how much hes fought those...”

“When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are...”

“Writing is a mysterious activity.”