Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

Success is never so interesting as struggle

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

The end is nothing; the road is all.

Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.

The apples on the other side of the wall are the sweetest.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Nothing is so effective in keeping one young and full of lust as a discriminating palate thoroughly satisfied at least once a day

Sometimes a man imagines that he will lose himself if he gives himself, and keep himself if he hides himself. But the contrary takes place with terrible exactitude.

"What do you want out of life?" I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.

One must be something, in order to do something.

Shelley is truth itself and honour itself notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion.

If something happened, like engineers starting to quit, things would go downhill fast.

In my years of acting, the one thing I was never able to do convincingly was to laugh on camera. Fake-laugh.