Grass is the least rewarding of all status symbols... The grass does nothing but drink money, exhaust energies, crush spirits, destroy sleep, create tensions and interfere with the watching of baseball games, and sprout insolent signs ordering humans to keep off it.

I mean the shoestring aristocrats of the upper East Side-the elegant, charming, and shabby men who work for brokerage houses, and their high-flown wives, with their thrift-shop minks and their ash-can fur pieces, their alligator shoes and their snotty ways with doormen and with the cashiers in supermarkets, their gold jewelry and their dregs of Je Reviens and Chanel.

The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.

The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.

Girls are not accustomed to jockeying for status in an obvious way; they are more concerned that they be liked.