ELSA MAXWELL

I don't hate anyone. I dislike. But my dislike is the equivalent of anyone else's hate.

Existence is a party. You join after its started and you leave before its finished.

Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.

Seeing unhappiness in the marriage of friends, I was content to have chosen music and laughter as a substitute for a husband.

Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity.

Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking.

A bore is a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you.

Someone said that life is a party. You join in after it's started and leave before it's finished.

I make enemies deliberately. They are the sauce piquante to my dish of life.

Serve the dinner backward, do anything - but for goodness sake, do something weird.

Fight fire with fire. If you must have bores, always put them together or at the same table ... bores have an effervescent chemical reaction on one another at a party. They invariably have a marvelous time trading banalities in the absence of competition. Clichés roll trippingly off the tongue like sparkling epigrams and trite observations acquire depth sinking into receptive minds.

Protocol may be defined as the code of etiquette which protects royalty from the competition of intellectual and social superiors.

Most rich people are the poorest people I know.

Intolerance of mediocrity has been the main prop of my independence.

Keep your talent in the dark and you'll never be insulted.

Anatomize the character of a successful hostess and the knife will lay bare the fact that she owes her position to one of three things: either she is liked, or she is feared, or she is important.

[On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.

don't try for wit. Settle for humor. You'll last longer.

To get fifty people to a cocktail party in New York, you ask one hundred. In Hollywood, you invite twenty.

the wealthy ... live in marble mausoleums surrounded by the suspicions and neuroses that have replaced the medieval moats which once isolated so-called aristocrats from reality.

Good manners - the longer I live the more convinced I am of it - are a priceless insurance against failure and loneliness. And anyone can have them.

Nothing spoils a good party like a genius.

Only those who have earned leisure know how to use it profitably.

What is a bore? Maxwell definition: a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. How do you spot one? Bores are always anxious to be seen talking to you.

The secret of my success is that no woman has ever been jealous of me.