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.

Marianne Dashwood looks at gray skies and sees blue. That's all very well, and it's not something you ever want entirely to lose. But you must lose a little of it; otherwise you're going to get wet.

Just write. It doesn't matter what you write. Just sit at your desk and write.

Children are the most wonderful audiences. What's struck me most is that that they watch it so silently, until the end when they shriek and shout and clap.

The only way you can have it all is by delegating all the running of the home to other people - which I don't ever want to do... So you do it yourself, and it takes time and energy and effort. And if you give it the time, it's profoundly enjoyable.

When husbands and fathers leave, their wives and daughters tend to value themselves less as a result.

We must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days are in fact here for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives.