Oscar Wilde has men -- and women -- pegged in his play "A Woman of No Importance."

"Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man's last romance." --Oscar Wilde

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor married and divorced each other twice, but he wrote her scores of love letters until the end of his life.

"I might run from her for a thousand years and she is still my baby child. Our love is so furious that we burn each other out." --Richard Burton

Dammit if Nick Hornby doesn't know how to write about male screw ups and the women who love them (most notably in "High Fidelity").

"I am cowed -- by her intelligence, and her ferocity and the way she's always right. Or, at least, she's always right enough to shut me up." --Nick Hornby

Nora Ephron's autobiographical novel "Heartburn" was just one of her many brilliant stories on love and relationships.

"I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being." --Nora Ephron

Writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch was married to John Bayley for 43 years, so she gets it.

"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." --Iris Murdoch