I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. 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.