Beware of people whose halos are on too tight.

They were a wonderful set of burglars, the people who were running San Francisco when I first came to town in 1923, wonderful because, if they were stealing, they were doing it with class and style.

Madaming is the sort of thing that happens to you - like getting a battlefield commission or becoming the dean of women at Stanford University.

It doesn't take much to produce a good merchant of cash-and-carry love: just courage, an infinite capacity for perpetual suspicion, stamina on a 24-hour-a-day basis, the deathless conviction that the customer is always wrong, a fair knowledge of first and second aid, do-it-yourself gynecology, judo - and a tremendous sense of humor.

We were so poor we envied everyone we ever heard of.

Romance without finance is a nuisance. Few men value free merchandise. Let the chippies fall where they may.

[On entering the restaurant business:] Food has the dubious advantage of being legitimate, and one's customers somehow manage to live longer without sex than food, if you call that living.