You're beginning to dislike me, aren't you? Well, dislike me. It doesn't make any difference to me now.

When a man's in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman's in love she doesn't care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.

I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.