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.

Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.

Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available.

My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.

[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.