“A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling “Thief.” If he is wise he has not been impoverished. Nor has the fool been enriched. The thief flatters us by stealing. We flatter him by complaining.”

For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.

I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when life’s hidden. It gives you a chance to imagine nice things, nicer than they are.

The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them.

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.

When I’m at a show, I’m yelling and cheering. I’m with those guys [the Grateful Dead].

It’s not tough at all as long as the fans are yelling, screaming and hollering.

Usually, critical words are accompanied by threats, name-calling, and yelling. This verbal abuse can be especially damaging.

It was right after 9/11 and I decided to walk around the grounds of the Pentagon, because I had never been there.

It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’

Leadership is something you earn, something you’re chosen for. You can’t come in yelling, ‘I’m your leader!’ If it happens, it’s because the other guys respect you.

Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.