Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

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.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

My father was in the First World War.