When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.