A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Forgotten is forgiven.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.