What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.

You can never know enough about your characters

Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.