So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.

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

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.

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.