...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.

I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.

War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist.

I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.

Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.

When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it . . . and it is all one.