Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When a man bores a woman, she complains. When a woman bores a man, he ignores her.
Smiling half-reluctance seems to promise more than the frankest gesture of desire.
Asceticism without religion is just another way of cultivating peculiar sensations.
Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past.
The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little.
Why is it forbidden in New York to acknowledge the charm and beauty of Los Angeles?
Bravery despite defeat is praiseworthy. Victory despite cowardice is beyond praise.
I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds.
The perfect aphorism would achieve classical balance and then immediately upset it.
Modernized by tin roofs and T-shirts, Third World poverty is no longer picturesque.
Writing about an idea frees me of it. Thinking about it is a circle of repetitions.
The educated do not share a common body of information, but a common state of mind.
In middle age, I practiced feeling old, but the real thing has been a rude surprise.
The family is on its way out; couples go next; then no more keeping cats or parrots.
Freedom is the moment between sleep and waking before selfhood and the world return.
Old among the young, poor among the rich, I adopt an air of indefinable superiority.
Our civilization is shifting from science and technology to rhetoric and litigation.
I am now old enough to make common cause with my predecessors against my successors.
Pornography does not inspire violence, but you can break a leg trying to imitate it.
Hatred of the mother is familiar, but the mother's hatred still comes as a surprise.
The aphorism offers a momentary sense of mastery over some confusion or unhappiness.
The self-righteous feel no need to be charming, and thus double their offensiveness.
Some marriages depend on domestic arguments the way the courts depend on litigation.
Alone, I am satisfied with myself. With others, I am beset by troubling comparisons.
Thank God for the passing of the discomforts and vile cuisine of the age of chivalry!
Lovers never want to say "I love you" at the same moment. Hence all the love stories.
Striving toward a goal puts a more pleasing construction on our advance toward death.
I am often attracted to people with whom I could not hold a five minute conversation.
Babies and the old are permitted self-absorption. In between, it provokes resentment.
The lazy manage to keep up with the earth's rotation just as well as the industrious.
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen: even less, the trouble I've successfully avoided.
Without the blessing of cowardice, the world would long since have been torn to bits.
F. Scott Fitzgerald thought that prolonging his adolescence would protect his talent.
Supermarkets depict abundance; boutiques exclusiveness; roadside stands authenticity.
If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.
The little suckings and smackings of the perversions are the sounds of joyous infancy.
Children would die of terror if they knew the folly and ignorance of their caretakers.
Everyone knows that (1) happiness is the goal of life, and (2) happiness is a chimera.
Friendship is love minus sex and plus reason. Love is friendship plus sex minus reason
A restaurant with candles and flowers evokes more reveries than the Isle of Bali does.
Forgetting and remembering are governed by laws, but we cannot find out what they are.
Worried about being a dull fellow? You might develop your talent for being irritating.
If I could do my life over, I would try to cleanse at least my pleasures of self-pity.
The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat.
Idleness makes people feeble and peevish. Work makes them stalwart and prone to anger.
The Insignificance of Man is a congenial theme; my own insignificance is a sore point.
Secrets die when kept or revealed. They live by being faintly and uncertainly repeated.
You are as happy as you think you are, but not necessarily as miserable as you imagine.
My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.
When my expectations are exactly fulfilled, I feel that something uncanny has happened.