Honesty means nothing until you are tested under circumstances where you are sure you could get away with dishonesty.

I regret to say that during the first act of this, I fell so soundly asleep that the gentleman who brought me piled up a barricade of overcoat, hat, stick, and gloves between us to establish a separation in the eyes of the world, and went into an impersonation of A Young Man Who Has Come to the Theater Unaccompanied.

...as for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.

[On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.

Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.

The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.