The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?

The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?