Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.

genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.

Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.

stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.