I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it.

He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.

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

Your rat tail is all the fashion now. I prefer a bushy plume, carried straight up. You are Siamese and your ancestors lived in trees. Mine lived in palaces. It has been suggested to me that I am a bit of a snob. How true! I prefer to be.

A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)

She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.

We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk." —