I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now.

Laughter is by definition healthy.

On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.