“The past is an educational toy for the present. It should be discarded the moment its usefulness is outgrown.”

“Marriage is the legal method devised to end love without pain.”

“There is no point in poverty if it does not make a rich man, observing it, feel better.”

“It takes a lot of wind to sail a leaky boat.”

“A dutiful wife enables a good man to add her hands to his own for self-applause.”

“I think long and carefully about what novels ought to do. They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment.”

“I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.”