“The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.”

Now, look, baby, ‘Union’ is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

[On the ringing of her doorbell or telephone:] What fresh hell is this?

It’s not the tragedies that kill us; it’s the messes.

Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour.

You do what you can, and you do it because you should. But all you can do is all you can do.

Vice is nice, but liquor is quicker.

The writer’s way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?

I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.

You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.

Friends come and go but I wouldn’t have thought you’d be one of them.

Don’t feel bad when I die; I’ve been dead for a long time.

I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

It was written without fear and without research.

This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn’t touch a superlative again with an umbrella.

In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you came from; it matters only where you are going.

The best armor against everything around you is to be well educated, to work hard, to be twice as good as if you had to be, to do languages and culture better.

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.

Maths is totally done differently to what I was teached when I was at school.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.

I didn’t go to normal children school. I went to sports school when I was 8. So I studied martial arts.

College students today are drowning in debt, and it is hurting them and hurting our economy. We must find a way to help families pay for college without condemning them to a lifetime of indebtedness.