Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.

Sober or blotto, this is your motto: keep muddling through.

She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say 'when.'

A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn't been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them.

They were real golfers, for real golf is a thing of the spirit, not of mere mechanical excellence of stroke.

If men's minds were like dominoes, surely his would be the double blank.