Quotes from Nicholas Delbanco

Fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle the truth. And autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked up and rearranged to invent a fictive self.

By the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs to be a writer of fiction; love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt and fear of death.

Work helps prevent one from getting old. I, for one, cannot dream of retiring. Not now or ever. Retire? The word is alien and the idea inconceivable to me. I don't believe in retirement for anyone in my type of work, not while the spirit remains. My work is my life. I cannot think of one without the other. To retire means to begin to die. The man who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest are the best remedy for age. Each day I am reborn. Each day I must begin again.

Imagine a World Without Writing What would it mean if nothing were written, if the pronouncement 'I give you my word' were sufficient as a contract, and if laws and liabilities were not codified as letters and words on a page? @poetswritersinc by Nicholas Delbanco

Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don't see

to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being….

expression, zeh kanah hokhmah, literally, "this one has acquired wisdom.

in Hebrew, where the word for "old," zaken, is an acronym formed from the expression, zeh kanah hokhmah, literally, "this one has acquired wisdom.

Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

the secret was to devote yourself entirely to one end, to one goal, and to work every day toward this goal, to put all your energy and imagination into the one endeavor. The only necessity was that this goal be unattainable.