“Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That’s New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then – the alley.”

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.

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

Instead of squirreling away your earnings early in your career, spend on experiences that will enrich your life – like diving with great white sharks. It can expose you to influential people who could open doors for you.

Black and white is how it should be, but shades of grey are the colors I see.

In movies we tend make things black and white: you’re either this, or you’re that.

The white people should go back to Europe, and the country should be returned to the American Indians. This is the future I would like to see for the so-called United States.

There are no insect eggs in my food.” Mrs. White reiterated. You should use that in your advertising,” Nate suggested.

I am the color red in a world full of black and white, and if you value your ability to breathe, don’t get too close. Save us, Chris. Save yourself.

If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan frees a man from any other form of penance.

Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.