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

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).

Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.

My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.

Your reader is at least as bright as you are

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

It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.