It is a most curious experience for a man of seventy-two to be confronted with the greenhorn enthusiasms of his youth. Young people think they are so smart. Alas the doctrines they spout with such fervor turn out to be mostly parroted from their elders.

The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.

I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

Women alone always order sole. It means something.

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.

A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.