My beloved child, break your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself, you break your own heart.
The longer I lived, the more beautiful life became - despite my personal tragedies, the fire, despite my third wife and her dreadful taste. My dear Olgivanna, she insisted on replacing the lovely canvas and wooden trusses at Taliesin West with steel supports and pink frosted glass. Well, I was too old to care by then. What I decided early on was this: If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it's like retiring.
I write most of my first drafts on an old manual typewriter, a really old one. It's a big black metal "Woodstock" from about 1920. I try to write everything down at once, in one sitting. The longer stories in this collection are divided up into sections. Each section represents a different sitting, a different idea for the same story.
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
Everything takes longer and costs more.
The great thing about writing about the ancient Spartans or Athenians is that so much knowledge is no longer extant that no one, except maybe a Cambridge or Oxford don, can call you out and prove you wrong.