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

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?

Everyone is a potential murderer-in everyone there arises from time to time thewish to kill-though not the will to kill.

One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave – our own self. Get on good terms with that companion – learn to live with yourself.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming… suddenly you find – at the age of 50, say – that a whole new life has opened before you.

There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

Any idea of a United India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.

You can’t have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That’s a recipe for disaster. And I don’t mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.

Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.

Sensible people take precautions against possible disasters, and of course one man’s idea of precaution is another man’s silly worry.

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

You may be a disaster for a day, a month, or a year. Just don’t be a disaster forever.

Sometimes nothing is happening and all that disaster just happens in your mind.