Elsa Maxwell Quotes

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.

Nothing spoils a good party like a genius.

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

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

Etiquette-a fancy word for simple kindness.

Someone has said that life itself is a party: you join after it's started and you leave before it's finished.

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.

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.

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

Cocktails are society's most enduring invention!

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

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

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

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

Most rich people are the poorest people I know.

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

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

Good manners spring from just one thing - kind impulses.

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

Down with boredom. It has to go.

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.

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

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 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.