“Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.”

Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.

You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

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.

Home is where you can be yourself.

Being who you are is a lot easier than faking it.

I do think the job of a writer is to raise questions and nobody likes the questions being asked.

Stress, in addition to being itself, was also the cause of itself, and the result of itself.

I’m so busy trying to breathe through the pain that I’m breathing through the pain of being with people, and that is no way to spend a life.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Don’t belong to anything. Don’t belong to anyone. Just Be. Feel your Being first and foremost, and don’t compare or compete. Just Be your Being.

Today in Germany, everyone is being watched–even the watchers.