I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down.

The sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.

Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.