Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.

Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.

Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.

There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not perfect. All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that's the novelists' materials. That's where they have to go. And a lot of that just isn't pretty. We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.

Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign.

Within one's own family money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything. There are all kinds of other things that we are not supposed to sell - political influence being one of them. We too rarely have public conversations about the common sense of money. We too rarely talk about the human cost of putting some of these economic measures into effect.