“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.”

You do what you can, and you do it because you should. But all you can do is all you can do.

Vice is nice, but liquor is quicker.

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.

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.

I can’t set my hopes too high, ‘Cause every hello ends with a goodbye.

Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government.

If those who do not possess knowledge avoid the scholarly discussions, disagreement will end.

For the majority of people, though they do not know what to do with this life, long for another that shall have no end.

This lack of self-control I fear is never ending.

I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.

I tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter. I had to fall to lose it all, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

In the end we’re all Jerry Springer guests, really, we just haven’t been on the show,