“What’s the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it’s over.”

“[T]he 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.”

“[W]hat upset grownups of both sexes about Elvis' performance was that he had broken the deepest taboo of all. He used his body as rhythmically and erotically and seductively as a woman--that was the forbidden territory he had entered. It was not only repulsive and offensive--it was nauseating--the word most used. It was an attack on male dignity.The kids, however, not yet grown into the stereotypes of gender, saw in him an exhilarating physical freedom.”

“[T]wo Americans re-encountering each other after a certain time in a foreign land are supposed to clamber up their nearest lampposts and wait tremblingly for it all to blow over.”

“I remember a little later wondering why things always turn out to be diametrically opposed to what you expect them to be. It's no good even trying to predict what this opposite will be because it always fools you and turns out to be the opposite of that, if you see what I mean. If you think this is geometrically impossible all I can say is that you don't know my life”

“Hated France when I first got over here. Got on the train at Le Havre, and looked out of the window and thought it looked so exactly like America, I wanted to cry. The scenery flying past, the hills and barns and cows, were just the sort of things you keep coming across through a train window in the States. The Untrained Eye, I told myself, training it enough to see that all the signs were written in French, at the same time letting the untrained nose get its first exotic whiff of garlic from my traveling companions, and the untrained stomach its first attack of French dysentery. But still, these were the only differences. I asked myself finally what exactly did I expect France to look like? No answer.”

“I only did it,' I said, 'now this is going to be the truth, Teddy, I only did it because it seemed to be the glamorous thing to do at the time. It was my ideal of glamour.”