Time is quick. Life is short. - Paul Scott

She laughed. "You haven't changed a bit. You never could stand criticism or leg-pulling. That's why you bored me, Ian. That was the trouble with your generation of so-called intellectual young men. All of you unmitigated, bloody bores with sloppy ideas and no remotest idea how to come to terms with life. When you found life coming to terms with you, you all wondered what the hell had hit you."

It is said that every seven years of your life you undergo a change which reflects itself in your attitude to your circumstances and to other people, and I think this may be true. If it is, then the change begins towards the end of a seven-year span, at the point, perhaps, where dissatisfaction with what you are doing and with where you are going sets in.

"I kept myself very much to myself, as one does if one is old and doesn't much care for the people round about."