Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

I learned that he invented the fold-up chair,

You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? I'm the opposite. I've gathered too much, and when one thing happens, it brings up everything else that's ever been similar to it. I don't just feel things once and then move on. I fell them over and over again, and the only new thing is whatever precipitated the memory of the old, so it never really feels new at all. Everything just gets integrated into one big giant ball...