She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession.

Life is made up of compromises.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.