Well, it's practically over, thank God - I'm 83, there won't be that much more of it to put up with I don't think!

Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most.

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

Nothing in this book is true.

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.