When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

• The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
• For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
• There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
• The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
• We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
• Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
• I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
• The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
• September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
• What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.