Elsa Maxwell Quotes
Someone has said that life itself is a party: you join after it's started and you leave before it's finished.
Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.
Good manners - the longer I live the more convinced I am of it - are a priceless insurance against failure and loneliness. And anyone can have them.
the wealthy ... live in marble mausoleums surrounded by the suspicions and neuroses that have replaced the medieval moats which once isolated so-called aristocrats from reality.
Seeing unhappiness in the marriage of friends, I was content to have chosen music and laughter as a substitute for a husband.
Protocol may be defined as the code of etiquette which protects royalty from the competition of intellectual and social superiors.
What is a bore? Maxwell definition: a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. How do you spot one? Bores are always anxious to be seen talking to you.
Anatomize the character of a successful hostess and the knife will lay bare the fact that she owes her position to one of three things: either she is liked, or she is feared, or she is important.
I don't hate anyone. I dislike. But my dislike is the equivalent of anyone else's hate.
To get fifty people to a cocktail party in New York, you ask one hundred. In Hollywood, you invite twenty.
Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity.
