Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Employing women as my primary protagonists has allowed me to step outside of myself, to distance myself from my own personality, far more easily than were I to look at events from a masculine perspective.

This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history's tragic glitter

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

You're better equipped for this world than I am," she said. "I'm always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.