Nancy Horan quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

I'm like the trunk of a cactus, I suppose. she told himI take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for a while until I get thirsty again. -Mamah Borthwick

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

[My father] had a name for the bottom of the sky--'the hem of heaven.

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.

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.

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

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.

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