Love wasn't a piece of music you could play over and over again with different interpretations. It actually needed to be improvised as you went along.

Memory is a great deceiver: it embroiders until naught is left but the glory and the pleasure.

This may be the very nature of love, a passion as fickle as the sea, full of certainty when the object of desire is absent, yet dubious when confronted again with the lover's presence.

Intelligence is power; it is the flame behind the spark of intrigue. Find out all the facts and stamp out the fire. Demystify.

It seems to me that women are freed from their responsibilities only when they are merry widows or eccentric old spinsters.

I was very fierce and very driven at eighteen. But my basic philosophy I think has stayed the same, I'm still an atheist, I still believe strongly in the power of free will (despite the mysticism in my prose). I don't believe in the notion of a pre-ordained destiny, and I think because of the sudden death of my father at sixteen I learnt then that it is essential to live life to the fullest as it could be snatched away at any second.

Everything flows from God, but we are limited by imposing our human perceptions upon him. Man designs God according to his own image and the image man has of himself is flawed.