For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."