[On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them?

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.

Oh, both my shoes are shiny new, And pristine is my hat My dress is 1922… My life is all like that.

I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn't do it. A "smartcracker" they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.