The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

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.

After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances.

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it.

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.