We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.

I try to keep the happy memories. If that's what you call selective memories, I'm good with that.

One thing I will surely miss is that I couldn't read all the good books in this lifetime.

Variety may be the spice of life, but consistency pays the bills.

The union of theorizer, organizer, and leader in one man is the rarest phenomenon on earth; therein lies greatness.

In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.

I was never a cokehead or anything like that. I always despised that drug. I thought it was a waste of time, pointless.

He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.

Why is everyone trying to tell me that when you get older it gets better?

and for the first time in my life I understand the end of that poem. And I never wanted to. You have to believe me.

I like New York in the spring and in the fall. It's one of the best cities to walk that I've ever been in.