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.

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words "justice," "compassion," "society," "struggle," "evil," would be unheard echoes on an empty air.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.