For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.

I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?

In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.

I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.