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?
The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face.
Manners are love in a cool climate.
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.
Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all.
In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
Los Angeles is just New York lying down.
I became one of the stately homos of England.
To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
Vice is its own reward.
I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to “Hamlet” on the grounds that I knew who won.
The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.
I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!
Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.
Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.
The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.
What is privacy if not for invading?