I cannot recall a more engaging passage in fiction, and I've been trying for almost eighteen seconds.

I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.

You'll have to leave my meals on a tray outside the door because I'll be working pretty late on the secret of making myself invisible, which may take me almost until eleven o'clock.

To err is human, to forgive supine.

English life, while very pleasant, is rather bland. I expected kindness and gentility and I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth.

Do you know anything at all that nobody else knows or, for that matter, gives a damn about? If you do, then sit tight, because one of these days you're going to Hollywood as a technical supervisor on a million dollar movie.

A basic ingredient in the manufacture of perfume, the attar-a heavy, pale-yellow oil stored in small metal drums-had been put up as collateral by Bulgaria, in lieu of gold, at the Moscow Narodny Bank, a Communist finance house for East-West trade.