First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
I'm a romantic a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
Forgotten is forgiven.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.