“Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.”

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them…

I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

We possess nothing certainly except the past.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.

You can’t really make people be any different than what they are.

You have to be true to who you are.

A person who is knowingly bent on bad behavior, gets upset when better behavior is expected of them.

In order to discover the character of people we have only to observe what they love.

The thing is, even if you’re playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.

We cannot live better than in seeking to become better.

Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character.

Courage is the gift of character