Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

You become who you pretend to be.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap.

You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.