Optimism is the content of small men in high places.

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Debut: the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.