Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.

Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.

To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.

The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.