The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.

To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.

I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.