Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy