In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.

I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling.

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

Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making - and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay.

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.