All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.

We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.