Before and after... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.

Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder.

We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.

I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors

In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.

I don't know what it is about human beings but most of us really like reading about or observing sexual tension and romance. It's just so much fun. I don't know if there is some Darwinian thing in us that really responds to that, but I think the most memorable scenes to me in books and movies are the ones where a couple is about to kiss.

I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.