A truly happy person is someone who is joyfully independent of outer conditions.
It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.
The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.
Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.
Doubt is my boon companion, the faithful St. Bernard ever at my side. Whether writing essays or just going about daily life, I am constantly second-guessing myself. My mind is filled with 'yes, buts,' 'so whats?' and other skeptical rejoinders. I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples. Age has not made me wiser, except maybe in retrospect.
The essay must be artistically rendered: You must keep the reader engaged, whether with wit, conflict, mischief, andor yes, with honesty.
In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.
Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything.
The base of our party is commonsense conservatives. If the Republican Party gets back to that base, I think our party's going to be stronger and there's not going to be a need for a third party.
Ally McCoist, Kenny McDowall, Ian Durrant, Jim Stewart - all fantastic people. It is still a brilliant club for me, although technically it is now a new club
Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.