Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.

I think the American West really attracts me because it's romantic. The desert, the empty space, the drama.

I'm a feminist, but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering, encompassing love - and it being more important and special than anything and everything else.

I believe that when you're in love you have to pour your heart and soul out to your partner... or why bother? So in that sense I'm an incurable romantic when it comes to men.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.