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.

My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much.

But success and failure are not true opposites, and they're not even in the same class. I mean, they're not even a couch and a chair.

Styles in wit change so.

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

Writers talk too much.

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.