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.

Be bad, and if you can't be bad be worse.

Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.

No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy.

We cannot choose the times we live in. Just as, sometimes, we cannot choose whom we love.