Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

You can't tell a doper well under control from a vegetarian book-keeper.

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.

A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.

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.