Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced—until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.

Never dress down for the poor. They won't respect you for it. They want their First Lady to look like a million dollars.

[Soon after he called his family.] The phone is ringing off the hook, and my poor 9-year-old is like 'What do I do?' ... This is surreal.

It is a poor family that hath neither a whore nor a thief in it