Sure, you make money writing on the coast ... but that money is like so much compressed snow. It goes so fast it melts in your hand.

Sometimes I think I'll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.

Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying.

The only dependable law of life - everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.

[On being shown an apartment by a real estate agent:] Oh, dear, that's much too big. All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

[On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them?

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.