Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own.

We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

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

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.

Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.