A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

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

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

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

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

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.