Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.
Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
