The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.

The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.

It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity.

A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.