“To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.”
“Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.”
“An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.”
“The young always have the same problem — how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this problem by defying their elders and copying each other.”
“Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.”
“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.”
“Manners are love in a cool climate.”
“Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.”
“This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.”
“The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.”
“However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.”
“My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.”
“Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?”
“Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.”
“Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.”
“Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.”
“Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.”
“Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.”
“The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as ''Soho'' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.”
“The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.”
“Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.”
“The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.”
“A gentleman doesn't pounce he glides. If a woman sits on a piece of furniture which permits your sitting beside her, you are free to regard this as an invitation, though not an unequivocal one.”
“Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically -- for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist -- but then what isn t?”
“It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.”
“In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.”
“When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?''”
“It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.”
“I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.”
“If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.”