Elsa Maxwell Quotes

People who have escaped from poverty are like old soldiers. In later years they recount the little, amusing incidents that happened infrequently, and conveniently forget the long, unrelieved stretches of misery and boredom.

Serve the dinner backward, do anything - but for goodness sake, do something weird.

Seeing unhappiness in the marriage of friends, I was content to have chosen music and laughter as a substitute for a husband.

the wealthy ... live in marble mausoleums surrounded by the suspicions and neuroses that have replaced the medieval moats which once isolated so-called aristocrats from reality.

The secret of my success is that no woman has ever been jealous of me.

Anatomize the character of a successful hostess and the knife will lay bare the fact that she owes her position to one of three things: either she is liked, or she is feared, or she is important.

Etiquette-a fancy word for simple kindness.

Nothing spoils a good party like a genius.

Only those who have earned leisure know how to use it profitably.

Someone has said that life itself is a party: you join after it's started and you leave before it's finished.

Good manners spring from just one thing - kind impulses.

Protocol may be defined as the code of etiquette which protects royalty from the competition of intellectual and social superiors.

Intolerance of mediocrity has been the main prop of my independence.

What is a bore? Maxwell definition: a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. How do you spot one? Bores are always anxious to be seen talking to you.

Cocktails are society's most enduring invention!

I make enemies deliberately. They are the sauce piquante to my dish of life.

Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking.

To get fifty people to a cocktail party in New York, you ask one hundred. In Hollywood, you invite twenty.

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.

Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity.

Fight fire with fire. If you must have bores, always put them together or at the same table ... bores have an effervescent chemical reaction on one another at a party. They invariably have a marvelous time trading banalities in the absence of competition. Clichés roll trippingly off the tongue like sparkling epigrams and trite observations acquire depth sinking into receptive minds.

Good manners - the longer I live the more convinced I am of it - are a priceless insurance against failure and loneliness. And anyone can have them.

Keep your talent in the dark and you'll never be insulted.

[On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.

The loudest psalm singer in the congregation always is a reformed sinner.

Most rich people are the poorest people I know.

[On Hollywood:] I had gone there expecting to see parties that reflected the stock-in-trade of the movies - glamour. Instead, I found the same attitude toward parties that European peasants had for baths. It was something to be done methodically every Saturday night.

don't try for wit. Settle for humor. You'll last longer.

Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.