"No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there."

"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."

"To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life."

"I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life."

"Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty."

"We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine."

"There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul."

"Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person."

"I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn't want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters."

"Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand."

"Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that..."

"All I think of ever is that I love you."

"It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air."

"Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious."

"I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes."

"Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all."

"It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want to see (Nicole to Dick)."

"The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets."

"They're a rotten crowd', I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."

"Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."

"We'll all be failures?""Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you?"

"Actually that's my secret - I can't even talk about you to anybody because I don't want any more people to know how wonderful you are."

"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."

"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."

"I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't."

"She was one of those people who are famous beyond their actual achievement."

"My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male."

"I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings."

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."

"I lived here once," the author said after a moment."Here? For a long time?""No. For just a little while when I was young.""It must have been rather cramped.""I didn't notice.""Would you like to try it again?""No. And I couldn't if I wanted to."He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: "It's really just like all houses, isn't it?"The author nodded."I didn't think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it's just like other houses after all."

"The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky."

"They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two."

"We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won't be Joan's [Joan Crawford's] next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we can think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his legion of decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33...but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes-so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children."

"The victor belongs to the spoils."

"I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound."

"It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before."

"It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water."

"Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen."

"You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans."

"Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke."

"He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden."

"Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another."

"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."

"In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party."

"I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity."

"You can stroke people with words."

"He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand."

"There's a loneliness that only exists in one's mind. The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink."

"I want excitement; and I don't care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat."

"I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart."