“It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.”

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in ‘Old Maid’; the player who is finally left with it has lost.

There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

I don’t believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn’t been told about it. It’s like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn’t been told it existed.

The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

To be understood and accepted could change so many lives.

You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.

Personal style is accepting who you are.

In Eastern culture, people see ghosts, people talk about ghosts, it’s just accepted. And in Western culture it’s just not.

Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on – and public acceptance of – the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?

I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make.

In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less.

One who knows how to show and to accept kindness will be a friend better than any possession.