"I first read this when I was a young girl, way before I had ever had any real romance of my own.... but Kathy’s speech to her maid Nellie about her love for Heathcliff always stayed with me: “Nelly, I AM Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more then I am always a pleasure to myself—but, as my own being.” It’s still for me the most passionate and fatalistic novel about romantic love."

"I love Louis Malle’s films because he’s always inventive in his own way. He’s not trying to be anybody else or copy any kind of fashion; he’s trying to give us something he believes in. In The Fire Within you feel this French, fifties-sixties kind of atmosphere: there’s always piano music by Satie and this feeling of desire for something grander, more powerful, more passionate. I felt that way as a teenager and a younger adult, always thinking life was never as intense as I wished it could be."