Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.

You want to be free and break new ground, speak your mind, fear no man, have the neighbours acknowledge that you're a good man; and at the same time you want to be a success, make money, join the country club, get the votes and kick the other man in the teeth and off the ladder.

A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not.

Money is a jealous mistress If you want money you must want only money. ... I must tell you the one secret of life, there is only one: everything is a jealous mistress, everything is terribly possessive, and, by God, we want to be terribly possessed if we want to get somewhere - and we want to be terribly possessed - anyhow; or what is life?

There are so may ways to kills yourself, they're just old-fashioned with their permanganate: do you think I'd take permanganate? I wouldn't want to burn my insides out and live to tell the tale as well: idiots! It's simple, I'd drown myself... Why be in misery at the last?

I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.

Why is it every careerist tries to turn his mother into a Madonna--to prove his intellect is a virgin birth, papa had nothing to do with it? It's the sign of the misogynist.