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

The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

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

Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.

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.

The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.