“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.”

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”

“[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”

“The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.”

“The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.”

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

“If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her t...”

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

“It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.”

“Stranger inside me, when you are born, I will give youa closed book and ask you never to read it, never rest, never forgive a man who wants to save you.”