[On James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed:] It is a vast enterprise encompassing all sorts of love, except, naturally, those branches which extend to Jews, Negroes, and people who have lost track of their great-grandparents.

I wanted to be cute. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.

Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.

Three highballs, and I think I'm St. Francis of Assisi.

The only dependable law of life - everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.

There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind...There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.

If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.