Behind the concept of woman's strangeness is the idea that a woman may do anything: she is below society, not bound by its law, unpredictable; an attribute given to every member of the league of the unfortunate.

A bank is a confidence trick. If you put up the right signs, the wizards of finance themselves will come in and ask you to take their money.

You want to be free and break new ground, speak your mind, fear no man, have the neighbours acknowledge that you're a good man; and at the same time you want to be a success, make money, join the country club, get the votes and kick the other man in the teeth and off the ladder.

I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.

A lie is real; it aims at success. A liar is a realist.

Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable, would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my old cough every winter? I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great-I-Am.

It's fine to be a great democrat when you've a slave to rub your boots on.