I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.

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.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.