“there are only two ways to make a lot [of money] while you’re young: One is to entertain the public; and the other is to cheat it.”

There’s one thing I’ve always known: You can let people suspect anything else about you, but you must never let them suspect you of knowing what you’re doing.

Marygreen did not change in sixteen years. It had changed little enough in the past two years.

Most people are so busy knocking themselves out trying to do everything they think they should, they never get around to do what they want to do.

Those places he had seen, she would never see; those fine things he had done, she would never do. But worst of all she would never see him again.

Charm is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.

There’s an old press-agents’ slogan that’s good advice: Don’t read your publicity – weigh it.

[Sex] is something big and cosmic. What else do we have? There’s only birth and death and the union of two people – and sex is the only one that happens to us more than once.

The only genius that’s worth anything is the genius for hard work.

War makes strangers bedfellows.

She was luxuriously tired and her muscles felt sore from the unaccustomed strain of riding astride.

If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness

the end of anything is a relief. In every relationship, even the most valuable, there are certain unpleasant tensions – and the ending of it snaps those taut inner wires.

I think Americans love success – but hate the people who have it.

I guess experience is just learning at first hand the things you knew all along anyway.

They had stopped now and he gave a glance up at the sky, through the trees, as though to see how much time was left. Amber, watching him, was suddenly struck with panic.

Nothing had ever tasted so good as the cool golden ale she swallowed from a pewter tankard. She slept deeply that night and longer than she had intended.

The struggle between the two worlds [Fascism and Democracy] can permit no compromises. It’s either Us or Them!

Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one’s belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.

A lot of times when I buy a lot of toys, I get a little jealous and keep one or two for myself. So I’ve got a couple of drones. I’ve got a couple of remote-control cars. I like to have fun

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

I’ve learned that it’s harder to try to put on this goody two-shoes persona when that’s not me.