If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

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

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.

At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

She wanted out of the decorating scheme.