I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

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

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

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

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.