Elsa Maxwell Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Elsa Maxwell
I hate cocktail parties. They're for people who're not good enough to invite for dinner—then they stay to dinner.

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

Elsa Maxwell
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.

Elsa Maxwell
People who have escaped from poverty are like old soldiers. In later years they recount the little, amusing incidents that happened infrequently, and conveniently forget the long, unrelieved stretches of misery and boredom.

Elsa Maxwell
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.

Elsa Maxwell
No one ever went broke in Hollywood underestimating the intelligence of the public.

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

Elsa Maxwell
Don't try for wit. Settle for humor. You'll last longer.

Elsa Maxwell
There was a running gag that Elsa Maxwell always traveled with fourteen trunks and a hatbox — the trunks for her clippings and the hatbox for her other dress. A base canard. I didn't own another dress.

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

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

Elsa Maxwell
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.

Elsa Maxwell
The loudest psalm singer in the congregation always is a reformed sinner.

Elsa Maxwell
Important enemies to me are the sauce piquante to my dish of life!

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

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

Elsa Maxwell
Good manners spring from just one thing — kind impulses.

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

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

Elsa Maxwell