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

Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.

Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you’re in over your head.

Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women’s hair rhapsodically described, women’s faces acclaimed in odelike language.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.

There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.

That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.

Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.

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.

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.

They’re a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time – and they’re phonies, all of them. And I head the list…their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness.

When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself.

There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.

Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.