None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well.

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; weve become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.

As a writer I've learned certain lessons. One of them is to be careful about how you put a view, and to bear in mind how easily and readily you'll be misinterpreted.

If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.

You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

One of the most destructive things that's happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together - which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.

There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.