The only reason to make a million dollars in this business is to tell some fat producer to go to hell.

I don't approve of the John Waynes and the Gary Coopers saying "Shucks, I ain't no actor - I'm just a bridge builder or a gas station attendant." If they aren't actors, what the hell are they getting paid for? I have respect for my profession. I worked hard at it.

(on Warner Brothers) This studio has more suspensions than the Golden Gate Bridge.

"The whole world is three drinks behind. If everyone in the world would take three drinks, we would have no trouble. If Stalin, Truman and everybody else in the world had three drinks right now, we’d all loosen up and we wouldn’t need the United Nations.

It's a good thing [James] Dean died when he did. If he'd lived, he'd never have been able to live up to the publicity.

It is at least worth arguing that there is a modicum of the creative novelist in all of us, and that this absorption with how men get out of difficulties, single-handedly and alone if possible, is the stuff of which we weave the warp and woof of our own better dramatic imaginings.

Acting is like sex: you either do it and don't talk about it, or you talk about it and don't do it. That's why I'm always suspicious of people who talk too much about either.