“Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.”
“The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.”
“No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.”
“Imprisoned in every fat man, a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out.”
“There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.”
“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”
“Youth is a period of missed opportunities.”
“Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of taste.”
“Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.”
“Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.”
“The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.”
“The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.”
“The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave.”
“We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.”
“No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.”
“We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.”
“The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.”
“The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.”
“Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.”
“Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph -- green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.”
“In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.”
“Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.”
“All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.”
“Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.”
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.”
“We must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.”
“The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.”
“It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.”
“There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.”
“As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.”