old age is more bearable if it can be helped by an early acceptance of being loved and of loving.

Talleyrand said that two things are essential in life: to give good dinners and to keep on fair terms with women. As the years pass and fires cool, it can become unimportant to stay always on fair terms either with women or one's fellows, but a wide and sensitive appreciation of fine flavours can still abide with us, to warm our hearts.

France eats more conciously, more intelligently, than any other nation.

War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist

I wrote like a junkie. I had to have my daily fix.

It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to bursting point on anything from quail financiere to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly.

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.