...smoking is just a habit. 'Tolstoy', she said, mentioning someone I hadn't met, 'says that just as much pleasure can be got from twirling the fingers'. My impulse was to tell her Tolstoy was off his onion, but I choked down the heated words. For all I know, the man might be a bosom pal of hers and she might resent criticism of him, however justified.

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.

It's curious how, when you're in love, you yearn to go about doing acts of kindness to everybody.

The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover-the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.

I can detach myself from the world. If there is a better world to detach oneself from than the one functioning at the moment I have yet to hear of it.