Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?