In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

If you're saving, you're succeeding

It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.

I've studied men from my topsy-turvy Close, and I reckon, rather true. Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy; Most, a dash between the two.

We'd rather have faithful Jews, Baptists or Buddhists than some of the Catholics who nearly run you over in the parking lot after Mass.

The trouble with worrying so much about your security in the future is that you feel so insecure in the present.

I like old-fashioned romance, when the two people sleep in separate beds but still hold hands all night. Their hands rest on a little table between the beds.

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.

If I were to talk to Lindsay Lohan, I'd encourage her to get the hell out of acting and into something soothing. Take up botany or something.

Whatever our problems are, dreams can provide novel ideas and sometimes magnificent resolutions.

Don't give up, cause despair sucks