“I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.”

The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.

I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent.

Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself.

The producer, director and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it’s a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it’s a flop.

I discovered early in my movie work that a movies never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.

I’ll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.

A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.

I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.

Immorality, perversion, infidelity, cannibalism, etc., are unassailable by church and civic league if you dress them up in the togas and talliths of the Good Book.

I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.

The rest of the fraternity is deadwood. Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.

Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him.

In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.

Although Damascus is considered the oldest city in the world, the date of its foundation going beyond tradition, there are very few relics of antiquity in or near it.

It’s probably similar to being in New York City and having a cab driver behind you and you’re driving too slow. It’s not the most pleasant thing.

Really,’ thought I, ‘we call Baltimore the ‘Monumental City’ for its two marble columns, and here is Edinburg with one at every street-corner!

I love Atlanta. It’s a great city with great crews there.

One of the great things about Sydney is that it has a great acceptance of everyone and everything. It’s an incredibly tolerant city, a city with a huge multicultural basis.

Our message will be that we’re going to make federal government buildings a model – an energy-efficient model – and also start matching grants for cities and counties so that they can also do the same with their government buildings.

Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.