My old man never liked me. He gave me my allowance in traveler's checks.

Young he was not, so that one had to call him old, but the word did not suit him.

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

What he liked he despised for being likable.

When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow.

The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

No man loves life like him that's growing old.

He was not a man who told himself comfortable lies.

He disliked the Empire and the Emperor particularly, but this was a trifle; he disliked most the French mind. To save himself the trouble of drawing up a long list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of the whole, once for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life.

And everything that he saw before him He despised or hated.