Charm is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.

If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness

There's one thing I've always known: You can let people suspect anything else about you, but you must never let them suspect you of knowing what you're doing.

... maybe that's all anyone who writes or paints or sculpts is doing anyway -- excusing themselves for refusing to live like other people or be like them.

There's an old press-agents' slogan that's good advice: Don't read your publicity - weigh it.

It seemed that up until this moment she had been only half alive.

[Sex] is something big and cosmic. What else do we have? There's only birth and death and the union of two people - and sex is the only one that happens to us more than once.