What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you.

I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.