Riches ... don't consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don't want to do. ... Riches is being able to thumb your nose.

Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.

I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.

It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says, "I must have this because I am me." It is a frightening thing because it is incurable.

Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.

The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.

A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.