Courtesy is fine and heaven knows we need more and more of it in a rude and frenetic world, but mechanized courtesy is as pallid as Pablum ... in fact, it isn't even courtesy.

Women keep a special corner of their hearts for sins they have never committed.

Women's virtue is man's greatest invention.

We all have our little illusions about our own mental abilities.

mosquitoes were using my ankles as filling stations.

There are compensations for growing older. One is the realization that to be sporting isn't at all necessary. It is a great relief to reach this stage of wisdom.

The reason for the scaffolding on the tower of Saint Germain-des-Près is that a rich American has purchased it and is having it crated for shipping.

Emily and I have now reached the time in life when not only do we lie about our ages, we forget what we've said they are.

... I have always fallen for ads. The sweetheart of J. Walter Thompson, I have a peasant-like belief in whatever miracle they profess to effect.

Tragedy can break the heart but not the dam of the tearducts while schmaltz can dissolve the most hardened sophisticate.

That amenity which the French have developed into a great art . . . conversation.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

If you are losing your peace in your quest for peace, you are not on the road to peace. The road to peace is peace.

If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market.

Moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments, and not ruins, behind it.

If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.

One of the worst things you could do in that world is curse at someone.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

(The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it. That's when I first started thinking about the typical view of reality.

You play crotch roulette, you're gonna hit double zero once in a while.

Each year, therefore, a dollar spent on alcoholic beverages has purchased a smaller quantity.