To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful.

The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn't want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

Love could never bloom in a concrete block room.

What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place-this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.

There used to be a category called women's fiction - meaning not too rude, not too much sex, a bit domestic and internal. Women have changed so much. We're so varied. And we've become more interested in the same varied experience in fiction.