This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

When we say we are certain so-and-so can't possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.

What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?

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

It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.

It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out.

Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.