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

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It’s just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.

I have known a number of Don Juans who were good studs and who cavorted between the sheets without a psychiatrist to guide them. But most of the busy love-makers I knew were looking for masculinity rather than practicing it. They were fellows of dubious lust.

I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.

Socially, a journalist ranks somewhere between the madam of a whorehouse and a bartender. but spiritually he ranks with Galileo, for he knows the world is round.

Love is a hole in the heart.

Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.

In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.

I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.

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.

If I thought the Jews killed God, I’d worship the Jews.

Perhaps God chose me to be an atheist?

There are a lot of very brilliant scholars who believe the reason we have incomplete science on evolution is that there is a higher power involved in this.

The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices

Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.

Nothing enlarges the gulf of atheism more than the wide passage that lies between the faith and lives of men pretending to teach Christianity.

In August, 1900, [Friedrich] Nietzsche was laid to rest Nietzsche, as the apostle of atheism, heralded the darkest century the world has ever known.

Some are Atheists by Neglect; others are so by Affectation; they, that think there is no God at some times; do not think so at all times.