Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it

LA doesn't have the heart of a paper cup.

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armour, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.