How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age...

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.

Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.