Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.

To lose is not always failure.

What matters is not whether you put your fork or knife together because you've finished your meal, or something like that. What matters is that you don't offend people, or hurt their feelings by mistake by saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing.

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

Nowadays people don't use face powder; they say it dries the skin. But I makeup in the old-fashioned way.

All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.