If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Styles in wit change so.

I don't think many writers like their best-known piece of work, particularly when it was written a long time ago.

I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.