The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.

All great lovers are articulate, and verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction.

performance is an act of faith.

The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.

Promiscuous ... was a word I had never applied to myself. Possibly no one ever does, for it is a sordid word, reducing many valuable moments to nothing more than doglike copulation.

You cannot throw words like heroism and sacrifice and nobility and honor away without abandoning the qualities they express.

To be successful in the world of art you must, of course, have talent, although very small talents have gone very far in this age. Just as the microphone gave volume to voices that had none, so does the science of press-agentry magnify limited skills into highly saleable properties.