When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.

To be perfect, one lacks only a defect.

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

Cosmetics is the science of a woman's cosmos.

There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.