I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

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.

I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.