Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Nancy Horan

If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.

I'm married to Kevin, a photographer whose career has put him on the campaign trail with presidential candidates and sent him on assignment to far-flung places for long periods of time. It was sometimes rough when our children were small, and I was beginning to write in earnest.

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.

'Loving Frank' is about a forbidden love affair between two people who lived a hundred years ago - Frank Lloyd Wright and his married client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. The affair set off a colossal newspaper scandal when the lovers ran off to Europe together.

History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.

I guess I'm drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.

I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me.

It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.

I love you so much. I love you enough that I want to stay separate from you. You're an extraordinary man, Frank Wright. I could so easily lose myself in your world and never make a world of my own. And where would that leave us? We'd both be bored stupid.

What did a person need to survive? Food. Water. Shelter. Warmth in cold weather. And something else... books.

How small we humans are. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. -Loving Frank

I'm like the trunk of a cactus... I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for awhile until I get thirsty again.

In the end, what really matters? Only kindness. Only making somebody a little happier for your presence.

Don't you see what's happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.