«Women: You can't live with them, and you can't get them to dress up in a skimpy little Nazi costume and beat you with a warm squash or something...»

«Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).»

«The younger generation finds a special value in the costumes of poverty and disarray simply because these aspects of life have become far scarcer for children of the middle class than good clothes and comeliness.»

«You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them -- no matter how old or impressive they may be -- as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much -- we simply grow taller. O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.»

«They have been painting the barn red and white, chasing skunks from the stage, clearing bird nests from the spotlights, scraping mildew from costumes and very gingerly, in the manner of city slickers, shooing snakes out of the yard.»

«You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure.»

«They take the paper and they read the headlines, so they've heard of unemployment and they've heard of bread lines, and they philanthropically cure them all by getting up a costume charity ball»