“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.”

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

Criticism is the essence of creation.

Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

What’s happening now is what happened before, and often what’s going to happen again sometime or other.

I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional – and I hate every kind of snob.

Now I’m an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.

There are three intolerable things in life – cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.

I’m strongly for a patient Bill of Rights. Decisions ought to be made by doctors, not accountants.

Jesus needs neither books nor Doctors of Divinity in order to instruct souls; He, the Doctor of Doctors, He teaches without noise of words.

It’s hard work making movies. It’s like being a doctor: you work long hours, very hard hours, and it’s emotional, tense work. If you don’t really love it, then it ain’t worth it.

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scalpel is a surgeon.

No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch.

Man is not made for space. But with the help of biologists and medical doctors, he can be prepared and accommodated.