“What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.”

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

Manners are love in a cool climate.

I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.

As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.

Happiness is the only thing I understand.

When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas.

Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

While I have very little to say in favor of sex (it’s vastly overrated, it’s frequently unnecessary, and it’s messy), it is greatly to be preferred to the interminable torments of romantic agony through which two people tear one another limb from limb while professing altruistic devotion.

It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.