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.

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.

... 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.

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.

The glutton usually realizes that gout is ever ready to pounce, and that alcohol is bad for him. But possible disaster weighs light in the scale against certain pleasure.

You may start small but don't stay small

There is no grief which time does not lessen and soften.

The Bible talks a lot about thankfulness, and I'm more thankful than I ever was. I try to concentrate on the hundreds of things that go right in a day, instead of the three or four that go wrong.

A captain who does not know where he wants to sail, there is no wind on Earth that will bring him there.

World unity is the wish of the hopeful, the goal of the idealist and the dream of the romantic. Yet it is folly to the realist and a lie to the innocent.

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.

Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

Corruption could lead to the collapse of the Party [Communist Party of China] and the downfall of the state [People's Republic of China].