"At nearly eighty, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive – 'I'm glad I'm not dead!' sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, 'Doesn't a day like this make you glad to be alive?' to which Beckett answered, 'I wouldn't go as far as that.') I am grateful that I have experienced many things – some wonderful, some horrible – and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues, and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called 'an intercourse with the world.'
"I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at eighty as I was at twenty; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done."
