In our long and obsessive passion for youth, we have - more than any other modern society - avoided direct approach to age and to dying by denying them in word, in fact, and - above all - in worth.

The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.

The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control their emotions by the application of reason.

The New York voice reflects its diversity, its foreignness, and, inevitably, the sense of superiority New Yorkers feel or come to feel. It says, without saying, We Know.

Euthanasia ... is simply to be able to die with dignity at a moment when life is devoid of it.

Money is not an aphrodisiac: the desire it may kindle in the female eye is more for the cash than the carrier.

The real demon is success-the anxieties engendered by this quest are relentless, degrading, corroding. What is worse, there is no end to this escalation of desire.