The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

The first breathe of adultery is the freest.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.