The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.

The fascinating necessarily tends to call a certain attention to itself; the interesting need not. An evening spent with a fascinating person leaves vivid memories; one spent with interesting people has merely a sort of bouquet.

The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.

Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.