Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.

For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one's friends must fail.

...I'm no longer the scales most lovers are, weighing the deeds and gifts and treasures proffered against those received or stolen from the other, trying always to bring into fatal balance two separate things.

If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.

The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no'.

I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place