My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters