“Bitterness leads nowhere. It turns back on itself. It is the eternal cul-de-sac.”

The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

I’m sure you have a theme: the theme of your life. You can embellish it or desecrate it, but it’s your theme, and as long as you follow it, you will experience harmony and peace of mind.

Don’t think. That is the wrong way to bring anything back. Let it go. Sooner or later it will flash into your mind.

It’s what’s in *yourself* that makes you happy or unhappy.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.

There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time.

You don’t realize what fine fighting material there is in age. You show me any one who’s lived to over seventy and you show me a fighter – someone who’s got the will to live.

Assumptions are dangerous things.

But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.

To every problem, there is a most simple solution.

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

The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

Fiction is founded on truth unless things did happen, people couldn’t think of them.

There are questions that you don’t ask because you’re afraid of the answers to them.

I learned that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back – that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one way street, isn’t it?

He who hasn’t tasted bitter things hasn’t earned sweet things.

She has every reason to be bitter, and yet her heart beats to the tune of kindness, and her soul dances to the melody of love.

Truth, however bitter, can be accepted, and woven into a design for living.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

There are three ways of learning golf: by study, which is the most wearisome; by imitation, which is the most fallacious; and by experience, which is the most bitter.

I’m not bitter. Why should I be bitter? I’m thrilled to death with life.

You know, I’ve had a bitter, hard life since I last heard your voice and if I’ve survived it’s all because of you.

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.