Elsa Maxwell Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

The cocktail party is easily the worst invention since castor oil — Elsa Maxwell

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

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

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. — Elsa Maxwell

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

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

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

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

[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 ... — Elsa Maxwell

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

Down with boredom. It has to go. — Elsa Maxwell

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

Nothing spoils a good party like a genius. — Elsa Maxwell

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

Etiquette-a fancy word for simple kindness. — Elsa Maxwell

Someone said that life is a party. You join in after it's started and 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

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can. — Elsa Maxwell

[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. — Elsa Maxwell

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

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

Most rich people are the poorest people I know. — Elsa Maxwell

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