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

Adultery is not a crime, it’s an amusement.

Half the joys and half the sorrows of this world are discovered in bed.

Women feel safe with me as well they should, because not only am I morally objected at going too far, but physically I cannot do 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.

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.

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

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.

Boundaries are basically about providing structure, and structure is essential in building anything that thrives.

It would be an error to try to build the Kingdom of Heaven upon envy. For nothing that is founded on envy can thrive; it must have another root.

For one country is different from another; its earth is different, as are its stones, wines, bread, meat, and everything that grows and thrives in a specific region.

Freedom which in no other land will thrive, Freedom an English subject’s sole prerogative.

Companies that solely focus on competition will ultimately die. Those that focus on value creation will thrive.

By union the smallest states thrive. By discord the greatest are destroyed.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

Strange customs do not thrive in foreign soil.