The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

The bachelors admired freedom is often a yoke, for the freer a man is to himself the greater slave he often is to the whims of others.

There is no legimate actor who can resist the powerful lure of the movies. It isn't the money that fetches him. It isn't the great publicity. It is simply this: the movies enable an actor to look at himself.

The Russian dramatist is one who, walking through a cemetery, does not see the flowers on the graves. The American dramatist . . . Does not see the graves under the flowers.

A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.

There is something distinguished about even his failures; they sink not trivially, but with a certain air of majesty, like a great ship, its flags flying, full of holes.