What she needs,' Tom said aloud 'is a husband.' Agnes said crisply, 'Well, she can't have mine.

I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.

The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying.

Trusting someone was like holding a little water in your cupped hands - it was so easy to spill the water, and you could never get it back.

I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.

The duck swallows the worm, the fox kills the duck, the men shoot the fox, and the devil hunts the men.

To someone standing in the nave, looking down the length of the church toward the east, the round window would seem like a huge sun exploding into innumerable shards of gorgeous color.