“The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.”

The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides

The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face

Assoon as I stepped out of my mother’s womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

Manners are love in a cool climate.

I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.