At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations. What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.

... one doesn't really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake.

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with.