"I was counting the waves", replied Amory gravely, "I'm going in for statistics".

A writer wastes nothing.

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."

I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed'-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.