They were a wonderful set of burglars, the people who were running San Francisco when I first came to town in 1923, wonderful because, if they were stealing, they were doing it with class and style.

[On entering the restaurant business:] Food has the dubious advantage of being legitimate, and one's customers somehow manage to live longer without sex than food, if you call that living.

No man can be held throughout the day by what happens throughout the night.

It doesn't take much to produce a good merchant of cash-and-carry love: just courage, an infinite capacity for perpetual suspicion, stamina on a 24-hour-a-day basis, the deathless conviction that the customer is always wrong, a fair knowledge of first and second aid, do-it-yourself gynecology, judo - and a tremendous sense of humor.

If you are being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it look like a parade.

Like I always say, if you sit long enough by the crack of the door, you'll see your enemy go by in a hearse.

We were so poor we envied everyone we ever heard of.