No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.

I do not think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration.

We Americans... like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength.

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.