“Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.”

Paris is the playwright’s delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor’s city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There’s a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Living in the lap of luxury isn’t bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.

I’m not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

Crooks aren’t the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.

Create your own visual style. Let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out.

I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.

Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

I don’t say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.

Never expect justice in this world. That is not part of God’s plan. Everybody thinks that if they don’t get it, they’re some kind of odd man out. And it’s not true. Nobody gets justice – people just get good luck or bad luck.

A movie in production is the greatest train set a boy could ever have.

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.