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.

Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

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

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

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