Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.

Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.

I suppose life is a little like that, isn't it, a message in a bottle pitched out to sea, to be carried by the winds and the tides, washing up on the beaches we could never imagine.

When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.

In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb

I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.

A romantic, I think, picks the rose and is careless with the thorn.

The things we ignore often come back to us in our sleep.

Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.

that strange conflict in the American character: we pride ourselves on being the melting pot of the world but we insist on regarding most immigrants with suspicion.

Feelings are something you have

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.

He who bets on governments and government money bets against 6,000 years of recorded human history.

To please men and to kill parasites are the only uses tobacco-its ultimate effects are the same in both cases.

You do not need to work to become spiritual. You are spiritual; you need only to remember that fact. Spirit is within you. God is within you. (67)

true courtesy ... is real kindness kindly expressed.

If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

Ultimately, I consider people to be more important than computers.

I'm blessed to be able to do what I do.