Are you kidding? I'm a terrible cook but John is a really great one. Literally I never cook. The whole time we were dating I prepared two officially romantic meals. Both of them were such disasters that he begs me never to go into the kitchen again.

When I started dating I had this kind of Romeo and Juliet fateful romantic idea about love which was almost that you were a victim and there was a lot of pain involved and that was how it should be.

I'm not cynical about marriage or romance. I enjoyed being married. And although being single was fun for a while there was always the risk of dating someone who'd owned a lunch box with my picture on it.

I'm 31 now. I think I'm beginning to understand what life is what romance is and what a relationship means.

I am a hopeless romantic and I love to spoil my girlfriends.

You know the man of my dreams might walk round the corner tomorrow. I'm older and wiser and I think I'd make a great girlfriend. I live in the realm of romantic possibility.

I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.

The Roman Catholic Church isn't going to change its theologies.

There is something sinister something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance melancholy. There's a sadness to it but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.

You know maybe I was just born in the wrong time but I love all things romantic. Puffy understands that. For my last birthday he covered my hotel room floor with rose petals and had flowers and candles all over the room.

It's easy to get wrapped up in sharing everyday life with a partner. It's fun to get lost in love and romance. It's the best. But holding on to yourself while doing that is the most important thing.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

When I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High ' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for the hero. This would be girl-driven very different I decided - and indeed it is.

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

Vampires are so old that they don't need to impress anyone anymore. They're comfortable in their own skin. It's this enigmatic strength that's very romantic and old-fashioned. I think it goes back to something of a Victorian attitude of finding a strong man who's going to look after his woman.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is intimacy spirituality color aspiration towards the infinite expressed by every means available to the arts.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion history romance and art would be useless.

After about the first Millennium Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture which spread throughout Europe much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture like Roman design it looks to the community.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture their amphitheaters for wild beasts to fight in.

The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.