The power of lying is much less than the power of what is not to be discussed.
— Mason Cooley
If success is a habit, it is a hard one to acquire.
Mind and body obstruct one another's pleasures.
The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.
Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.
Events are called inevitable only after they have occurred.
Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.
Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends.
Dancing and running shake up the chemistry of happiness.
A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats.
Worried about being a dull fellow? You might develop your talent for being irritating.
My mind is led astray by every faint rustle.
Observe decorum, and it will open a path to morality.
The passion for money is never fickle.
Cruelty is softened by fear, not pity.
Money: power at its most liquid.
Young men preen. Old men scheme.
Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.
Few friendships could survive the moodiness of love affairs.
Innocence is thought charming because it offers delightful possibilities for exploitation.
Romantics consider common sense vulgar.
If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting.
Living alone makes it harder to find someone to blame.
The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.
Friends are sometimes boring, but enemies never.
Amazing that the human race has taken enough time out from thinking about food or sex to create the arts and sciences.
A blunt statement can be as false as any other.
Rage is exciting, but leaves me confused and exhausted.
Moo may represent an idea, but only the cow knows.
In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words.
Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.
The body has a mind of its own.
The beloved is the ultimate fetish.
The time I kill is killing me.
Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape.
The shades of respectability begin to close about the greying head.
If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements.
Stated clearly enough, an idea may cancel itself out.
If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.
If I play hard to get, soon the phone stops ringing altogether.
Old and young disbelieve one another's truths.
Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it.
A sense of blessedness comes from a change of heart, not from more blessings.
Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.
Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.
General statements omit what we really want to know. Example: some horses run faster than others.
Eternity eludes us, even as a thought.
Romance is tempestuous. Love is calm.
Never try to leap from a standstill.
Many gloat over their own troubles.
