It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

There are three cardinal rules - don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

Love each other or perish.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.