If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.
After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.
I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
It’s a mining town in lotus land.
The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.
Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
You really ought to read more books – you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.
The rich are different from us.
The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire’s bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.