What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?

Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.

However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.

They write them long because they can't write them short.

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.

I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.