It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.

the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

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

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

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.