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

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

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.

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.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The way the business things work in Russia is you have to meet people, you have to go through a certain amount of etiquette and business things are done just simply by a shake of the hand and whether they like you or not.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

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

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made.

Every one of us is an artist, and as an artist, you really can stroll into any venue that you want, as long as you take your time to learn the etiquette of that venue.

I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city.

We already know that anonymous letters are despicable. In etiquette, as well as in law, hiring a hit man to do the job does not relieve you of responsibility.

Nothing is less important than which fork you use. Etiquette is the science of living. It embraces everything. It is ethics. It is honor.

Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding.

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.

And doing a film in that period, and having to really celebrate what they wore back then, how they sat and how they spoke. You know, what the etiquette was back then for a lady. All of those things are like putting on a wig and transforming yourself, which I love.

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

Etiquette does not render you defenseless. If it did, even I wouldn't subscribe to it. But rudeness in retaliation for rudeness just doubles the amount of rudeness in the world.

In general, I'm not much into etiquette and am a rule-breaker and rebel by nature.

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

We need to begin an all-out diplomatic offensive on Darfur in order to prepare the way for a peacekeeping force that can ensure protection for the people of Darfur.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

I don't like to hurt people, I really don't like it at all. But in order to get a red light at the intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident.

I think acting is about forgetting yourself in order to give the best of yourself. It's passing through you more than you're creating it. You're not the flower, but the vase which holds the flower.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

It's a very hard and competitive business in which you have to fight every day in order to impose yourself.

I am co-counsel and as co-counsel I have the right to represent myself, speak for myself and conduct myself and my trial by myself in my best interests in order of due process.