The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

It takes a long time for words to become thought.