It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.

Dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase.

Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it, French hoard it, Italians squander it, Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Know what I say? I say time is a crook.

And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.

Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.