“Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.”

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.

Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

I don’t really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.

I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?

If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.

What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.

I’ve never not been famous.

I’m definitely a hair down girl. I’m a fan of the natural, earthy look.

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

I cannot hold with those who wish to put down the insignificant chatter of the world.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

Be careful of love. It’ll twist your brain around and leave you thinking up is down and right is wrong.

The true guide of our conduct is no outward authority, but the voice of God, who comes down to dwell in our souls, who knows all our thoughts, to whom are owing all the truth we know, and all the good we do; for vice is voluntary, and virtue comes from the grace of the heavenly spirit within.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

Some folks pay a compliment like they went down in their pocket for it.