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

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

Good manners spring from just one thing - kind impulses.

[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.

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

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.

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