“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.”

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out.

I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.

Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

I don’t say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.

Never expect justice in this world. That is not part of God’s plan. Everybody thinks that if they don’t get it, they’re some kind of odd man out. And it’s not true. Nobody gets justice – people just get good luck or bad luck.

A movie in production is the greatest train set a boy could ever have.

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.

See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

Criticism is the essence of creation.

Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

The truth of life is that, even the doctor needs a doctor.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in I went.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.

I come from a family of doctors and engineers, and everyone expected me to take up a similar career. That was the most natural thing to do!

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

My grandad, he has his doctorate in psychology.

My doctor told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.