I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.

Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.

Vice is nice, but liquor is quicker.

[Completely bored by a country weekend, wiring to a friend:] For heaven's sake, rush me a loaf of bread, enclosing saw and file.

There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.