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.

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.

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.

[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.

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