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

I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.

One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate

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.

Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?