The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.

It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them.

A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.