“Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?”

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Vice is its own reward.

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

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

What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

To lose is not always failure.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”