The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.

It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.