to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.