The Dud Avocado (New York Review Books Classics)

I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I’ve suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.

To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit.

I was experiencing that terrifying thing of suddenly seeing someone you know terribly well as if for the first time.

It’s amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.

A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.

It was hard to believe that it was the beginning of July, not the end of summer. I thought: is summer only a state of mind? Is it always only two months long from whenever you start it?

I learned something from him, I hope. Lesson I: No matter what you do you’ve got to try to do it well. Otherwise it’s unbearable.

What was the use of remembering? If it was unpleasant, it was unpleasant. If it was pleasant, it was over.