I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

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

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

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.

If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?