Florence King

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

It takes only one child to raze a village.

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

If we define a misanthrope as someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer, we have described a person with something to look forward to.

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.

To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy. If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well

He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.

If we define a misanthrope as 'someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,' we have described a person with something to look forward to.

Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.

I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.

There is more sexism in a year's worth of movies than actually exists in a woman's entire lifetime.

American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.