FLORENCE KING

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.

American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.

Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.

He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time.

We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust; a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to government.

The long march of Western civilization from pantheons of gods for every taste to one God for all has been thrown into reverse by celebrity worship to give us a plethora of ancient deities to follow.

If the West Point class of 1915 is called 'the class the stars fell on' for the number of World War II generals it produced, my junior-high class of 1950 is the class a ton of bricks fell on from Hollywood's gut-wrenching portrayals of mother-love in '40s-era movies.

Some last words seem flat-out unbelievable.

I believe in a Republic of Merit in which water is allowed to find its own level, where voters, like drivers, are tested before being turned loose.

A man should never apologize!

In baseball, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, but in political commentary, you need a metaphor.

Let's face it: 'Threatening' people are the only interesting people around. The unthreatening are, by and large, competent mediocrities who take lemming-like aim at careers in television.

In 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' I couldn't take my eyes off Judith Anderson as Big Mama.