No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people..

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves..

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bu….

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so….

the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven..

Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons..

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and se….

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life..

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you..

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed..

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast..

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality..

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one..

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is….

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything..

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ….

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed..

Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own..

Old age makes caricatures of us all..

read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have ac….