“Until one looks back on one’s own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.”

Time is the best killer.

The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering.

It is deplorable to remove all the romance – all the mystery!

Any coincidencce is worth noticing. You can throw it away later if it is only a coincidence.

The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.

One never quite allows for the moron in our midst.

Writers are diffident creatures — they need encouragement.

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.

An appreciative listener is always stimulating.

Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.

The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.

Any woman can fool a man if she wants to and if he’s in love with her.

To count – really and truly to count – a woman must have goodness or brains.

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

When the fact doesn’t meet the theory then let go the theory.

I was a funky kid.

I grew up all around the Bay, but I spent most of my time in Hayward and I loved it. It was a really big apartment community, there was a whole bunch of kids.

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by survival of the fittest.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I’m not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

I guess the real reason that my wife and I had children is the same reason that Napoleon had for invading Russia: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.