But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.