the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Youth is always an enemy to the old.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.

Only on the surface of things have I ever trod the beaten path. So long as I could keep from hurting anyone else, I have lived, as completely as it was possible, the life of my choice. I have been free. . . . I have done the work I wished to do for the sake of that work alone.

there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.