“Of Orson Welles: It’s like meeting God without dying.”

Oh, seek, my love, your newer way; I’ll not be left in sorrow. So long as I have yesterday, Go take your damned tomorrow!

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

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.

Ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.

The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.

By the time you swear you’re his, Shivering and sighing. And he vows his passion is, Infinite, undying. Lady make note of this — One of you is lying.

All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

Money cannot buy health, but I’d settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

Writing well is the best revenge.

And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.

Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.

The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.

I hate writing, I love having written.

Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.

Ducking for apples — change one letter and it’s the story of my life.

Even the existence of this corporeal element, low as it in reality is, because it is the source of death and all evils, is likewise good for the permanence of the Universe and the continuation of the order of things, so that one thing departs and the other succeeds.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

When I’m dead, I want to be remembered as a musician of some worth and substance.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And there I will die smothered.

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.