Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.

Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

[On hearing that President Coolidge was dead:] How can you tell?

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

[From a window in the Writer's Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are.

There are times when images blow to fluff, and comparisons stiffen and shrivel.

Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.