36 Quotes by John O'Hara

It made a change in himself, and we must not change ourselves much. We can stand only so many—so few—changes. To know that there were people who he thought were his friends, his good friends, but who were his enemies—that was going to make a change, he knew. When was the last time there had been a change in himself? He thought and thought, rejecting items that were not change but only removal or adornment.

God help us all but he was right. It was time for him to die. There was nothing for him to do today, there was nothing for him to do today.… There, that was settled. Now let the whole thing begin again.

Girls fitted easily into their own and your own picture of someone dying of unrequited love. If they slipped out of it before you were ready, that was all right too; their slipping out frequently was the necessary reminder that an affair had run its course. It also was the necessary reminder that the realist in a woman, the good appraiser, makes her want to take a loss and get out before she is—for the purposes of the analogy—ruined.

I’m so afraid, but it’s just as wrong to stop, isn’t it? Isn’t it just as wrong to stop?

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.

On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before. One minute she was asleep, the next she was completely awake and dumped into despair. It was the kind of despair that she had known perhaps two thousand times before, there being 365 mornings in a calendar year.

Bing: You’re a heel…a low down rotten heel…anything that doesn’t go your way, anything that you can’t have you destroy.

Little old ladies of both sexes. Why do I let them bother me?

I wasn't ready to go out to pasture. I didn't have a worldwide travel agenda and I didn't want to work on the world's greatest novel ... I wanted to stay busy, but not in the pressure cooker. This is a perfect transition.