Lee Radziwill

I have a great curiosity to see new things, but not to own them. It's very peaceful this way, and one of the nice things about getting older.

I don't like dining rooms. I think they have too much structure and are too formal.

Despite loving England and loving English gardens, I'm not a chintz person, never was. It's too cute.

Paris is the most beautiful city in the world. It brings tears to your eyes.

When I was seven and we lived in New York, I ran away. I took my dog and started out across the Brooklyn Bridge... I didn't get very far... It's rather difficult to run away in your mother's high heels.

I've always wanted to be an actress. At school and in college, I did some things. But then I married, and then I had children, and then there were the political years.

I think there's nothing that makes you happier than to be really involved in something.

I am always aware that I've had a special and privileged life, yet it has been balanced by tragedy as it has been for so many others.

I always begin a room with the rug; it is literally the foundation of the space. I then go on to the furniture.

My ideal evening is to have dinner with one person or a few persons, and then be in bed by 11.

I don't know where this myth that I go to a lot of parties stems from. It's a total myth. I may go out to something special once a year.

I like people like Andre Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Willa Cather, Robert Graves, Erik Erikson, and Francis Steegmuller.

I'm obviously all for women's lib.

I've often thought - even though it's hard to give him even more credit than he has had - that Andy Warhol must have started a lot of 15 minutes of fame.

I find it hard to read people's minds, my own children's minds even harder. But it all worked out, and I was blessed with two wonderful children.

I never saw a play with my mother until I was 14, and then it was 'Hansel and Gretel.'

When I was young, I used to think that everyone should die at 70.

I feel like I'm in my own world: in the world but not a part of it.

Jackie's dream was France, but mine was really art and Italy, as that was all I cared about through school. My history of art teacher, who saved my life at Farmington, was obsessed with Bernard Berenson, and I succumbed as well.

My mother endlessly told me I was too fat, that I wasn't a patch on my sister. It wasn't much fun growing up with her and her almost irrational social climbing in that huge house of my dull stepfather Hughdie Auchincloss in Washington.