The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.