“A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.”

“It takes twenty years to make an overnight success.”

“He was as young as twenty years allowed, and as old as it could make him.”

“A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp.”

“This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel…”

“When a woman reaches forty, she must wait twenty years for her husband to catch up.”

“The King had every privilege except that of being at ease. Pompadour provided the atmosphere in which that final luxury was possible. She did not do this, as anyone who thinks about the matter for twenty seconds will know, by twenty years of rapt contemplation of the ceilings of Versailles. Indeed, Pompadour was not a physically ardent woman, and love-making tired her. After about eight years of their association Louis XV did not sleep with her… But it was to Pompadour that he talked, and it was to Pompadour that he listened.”

“Silliness which would have broken a politician twenty years ago, now makes his fortune.”

“He knows bad days. Bad days take him completely by surprise. They make him not trust the good days because it's likely something is lurking twenty-four hours away.”

“It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.”