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

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.

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.

I use humour a lot. My foundation is tragic, but my appearance is humorous.

Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.

The first word you see at the airport is ‘terminal’.

There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter.

A fool must now and then be right, by chance

I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

Some songs are too repetitive for me to be able to fashion a humorous set of lyrics around. Some songs flat-out just don’t work creatively for me.