“Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.”

If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones. After all, there are better ways to starve to death.

When I wake up,” he said, “remind me that I’m going to marry her.

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.

One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.

They enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like children and playing together like dogs.

Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

Elicited by a particular set of circumstances on a particular day, and we do well to wait a while before concluding that what we see is the whole person.

While these tendencies were no doubt in train in the “old,” pre-1990s economy, they accelerated over the past decade as a number of technologies with their roots in the cumulative innovations of the past half-century began to yield dramatic economic returns.

In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.

There is one plain rule of life. Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it.

Highly resilient people are flexible, adapt to new circumstances quickly, and thrive in constant change.

I am quite my own master, agreeably lodged, perfectly easy in my circumstances.

They have a knack for creating good luck out of circumstances that many others see as bad luck.

Today, as a result of a miraculous set of circumstances,