Just about everything significant in my life happened after I passed forty. I was a housewife and mother, but yearned to be a writer. I worked at my writing whenever I could snatch a moment, and I assembled several manuscripts. I was just about forty when my first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published. Then a few months later came The Good Earth. My career was launched at last, and it has given me the richest possible satisfaction

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly thereafter.

As for inhibitions, I've spent a lifetime developing them, and I don't intend to lose them.

We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

On this earth, though far and near, without love, there's only fear.