Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat . . .

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes.

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.

It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.