It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.

read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

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

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

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