“There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.”

The writer’s way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?

I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.

You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.

Friends come and go but I wouldn’t have thought you’d be one of them.

Don’t feel bad when I die; I’ve been dead for a long time.

I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

It was written without fear and without research.

This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn’t touch a superlative again with an umbrella.

What ever beauty may be it has for its basis order and for its essence unity Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it.

There’s life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.

Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.

Intelligent people tend to talk about the facts. They don’t sit around and call each other names. That’s what you can find on a third grade playground.

I only weigh 220, so I have to do something to keep from being tossed around by all the guys who weigh 250 and more. I train hard, but I don’t try to get too big.

Once you are labeled ‘the best’ you want to stay up there, and you can’t do it by loafing around.

A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him.

When I travel around the country, I see great companies with new ideas and a can-do attitude. But too often they are in hand-to-hand and pen-to-paper combat with officialdom.

I’m not the king in my own house. I have to wash the dishes and take out the trash and say, ‘Yes, baby.’ I’m 6-foot-5, but I kind of walk around hunched over.

You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don’t love and don’t have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined.

You need an incredible amount of self-confidence to go digging around in someone’s brain.