In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

Those who have money think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know it is money.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

Now don’t go thinking nice things about me. You’ll only be disappointed.

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

In life, there are no shortcuts to joy. Anything that is worth pursuing requires us to suffer just a little bit.

Competitiveness always rests on the assumption of a life-and-death struggle.

You have to fail and then get better. Then you have to fail again, and then get even better.

Distractions have never prevented a Writing Writer Who Writes from writing; distractions are an excuse proffered by Non-Writing Non-Writers Who are Not-Writing for why they are not writing.

I always had this yearning to give and help and make people feel better.

Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of [Barack] Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."

The problem is we think we exist.

Over the years, I'll admit, I lost the love for basketball a little bit.