What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.

In the broad sense, as a processing of everything one hears or witnesses, all fiction is autobiographical - imagination ground through the mill of memory. It's impossible to separate the two ingredients.

But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them, sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success

I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.

Children don't make judgments about which details are important... a child captures them all.

In foreign countries they fear baldness. They are so rich in foreign countries, they can afford to fear all kinds of silly things.