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

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.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

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

In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.