The world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility

Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother.

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

Everything that begins, begins with blood.

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?