Elsa Maxwell Quotes

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.

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

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.

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.

[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.

The cocktail party is easily the worst invention since castor oil

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

[On Hollywood:] I had gone there expecting to see parties that reflected the stock-in-trade of the movies - glamour. Instead, I found the same attitude toward parties that European peasants had for baths. It was something to be done methodically every Saturday night ...

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

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

Etiquette-a fancy word for simple kindness.

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

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.

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

Down with boredom. It has to go.

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

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

Good manners spring from just one thing - kind impulses.

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

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