When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?

The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.

He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.