There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.

Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

The parrot holds its food for prim consumption as daintily as any debutante, [with] a predilection for pot roast, hashed-brown potatoes, duck skin, butter, hoisin sauce, sesame seed oil, bananas and human thumb.

It’s true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.

Silence [is] the unbearable repartee.

Artists are never complete people. But if it’s art that completes them, then what is taken away?

Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.