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.

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

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.

Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.