An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

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

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read.

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