“Life was life. It happened. You never knew what was going to come at you. Or how you could defend yourself.”

Successful women don’t sleep until noon.

Edwina always enjoyed a morning ride. Some mornings she rode the horse, and some mornings she rode the groom.

I work eight hours a day, but I’m not writing all that time. I’m thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of.

We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.

This parting cannot be for long; for those who love as we do cannot be parted. We shall always be united in thought, and thought is a great magnet. I have often spoken to thee of reason, now i speak to thee of faith

What is done can never be undone.

Bookstores see a book by a woman and they put it in the romance section.

Elizabeth studied the blurry tabloid photo, which showed her cousin Mary Stuart leaving a Paris disco at dawn, drunkenly clinging to the arm of a French tennis pro. The message was very clear. Put passion first and you end up neither loved nor respected.

My dear girl, you must cultivate a taste for the finer things. Civilized pleasures give meaning to life.

Priceless things matter not for their value, but because they offer us an enduring reminder of stability and permanence.

Even the most powerful woman needs a place to unwind.

When you are a strong woman, you will attract trouble. When a man feels threatened, there is always trouble.

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

In my opinion, moderation is a vastly overrated virtue, particularly when applied to work

I will never stop writing. People often ask when I will retire, but I say it’s none of their business. Writing defines who I am. I love the feeling of holding a finished book in my hands, and then I can’t wait to start the great adventure of writing the next one.

Elizabeth lay face-down on the massage table, and allowed Marco to relieve the stress of the business day with firm and knowing fingers. Success, she decided, was often a matter of knowing when to relax.

We are your brothers, your daughters, your friends. We just happened to have been wrapped in a smaller package.

What has happened to the adult human?

In 1994, nobody could have predicted ‘Shawshank’ would one day be an iconic movie – and believe me, that would never have happened if Danny Glover had been Red instead of Morgan Freeman.

I’ve met a few people in my time who were enthusiastic about hard work. And it was just my luck that all of them happened to be men I was working for at the time.

There would be no chance to get to know death at all …if it happened only once.

I had no idea what I wanted to do. In my last two years of high school here happened to be these few scripts that I really responded to.

I am so enriched because so much has happened in my life. The way I can express myself is because of the life I have led. It’s only when you experience life can you emote it.

We’re not going to think about what’s happened in the past.