"Memoirs of a Professional Cad" [.]

[fiefoe]

George Sanders didn't reveal much about himself in the book, so it's hard to find a place to hang the knowledge that he professed to have died of boredom.
__ Being a person of the highest taste, I am continually incurring my own disapproval.
__ I'm... learning to view my few failings with infinite compassion.

If only he were a more disciplined writer:

• It is perhaps interesting to note that even the most gifted, the most virtuous, or those most assiduously addicted to the practice of common sense are all equally at the mercy of the almighty booby trap of circumstance.
• Good manners is an indulgence during courtship as opposed to a necessity in marriage.
  
• If you go to a party with the impedimenta of a date, an overcoat or a hat, you are sunk because then you have to leave by the front door.
• It's a business principle with me to treat directors with craven servility.
• The long white wings of circling gulls swept the sky like slender brushes painting it from a light to a darker blue.
• The professional mourners of Dickensian England, the black-plumed horses of France, the uproarious Irish wakes, the Indian suttee, are surely only manifestations of the strange fact that death seems to bring out in man an instinct for festival.
  

'She is of whole cloth. An isotope of feminity.' How fitting that the woman who advised "Never complain, never explain." has a Apocrypha section in her wiki entry.

'Hollywood... a sort of emotional native habitat':
__ In Ronald Reagan's All-General-Electric house even the drinks seem to be served electronically.
__ The first assistant director was... none other than the real Mike Romanoff, His Imperial Highness Prince Micheal of all the Russias.

Gertrude Lawrence, Aga Khan (Margaret Whigham), Jack Warner, Bernard Buffet ^

Rubens: 'Saturn Devouring His Son'
[Congreve]: 'Let us be very strange and well-bred:/ Let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while;/ And as well-bred as if we were not married at all.'
[Maugham]: 'We are the people who count. We give the world significance. You are only our raw material.'

<<