“What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.”

“But perhaps what mattered at eighty was habit, the body no longer interested in sex, the mind no longer interested in speculation, the smaller things in life mattering more than the large and, in the end, the slow realization that nothing really mattered at all.”

“I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.”

“Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.”

“What do you mean by sound government?'Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.'Then we haven't got sound government.”

“He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation.”

“With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we believe.”