One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.

It would help not to treat age as if it were any less of a pleasure than it was when we were six and saying, 'I'm six and a half.' You know, we could be saying, 'I'm fifty and a half' and say it with joy. Each age is different and has different discoveries and pleasures.

I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER)

To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful ... was a mark of the Greek spirit.

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.

Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression.