人不应惧怕死亡，而应惧怕从未开始生活。

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing—not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

To write a life is to walk a tightrope between fact and interpretation.