Disraeli felt that 'nothing could compensate his obscure youth, not even a glorious old age.' Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.

Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing.

I could never figure out - or probably did not take the trouble to figure out - what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I com…

As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an id…

Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert…

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.

He is dead already who doth not feel Life is worth living still.