A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing him and trying to improve him.

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.

But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from...the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them.

The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.

In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.