A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling 'Thief.' If he is wise he has not been impoverished. Nor has the fool been enriched. The thief flatters us by stealing. We flatter him by complaining.

It is a mark of friendship to imagine the worst possible things about a friend.

I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like when life's hidden. Gives you a chance to imagine nice things. Nicer than they are.

There’s a thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die—their silence. For a while an echo stays in your ear. You hear a laugh, a knowing phrase or two, a certain quality of enunciation. Then, nothing. Another death takes place—voices.

There is hardly one in three of us who live in the cities who is not sick with unused self.

The German mass murder of the Jews... brought my Jewishness to the surface.

Of the 60 movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less.

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.

In pre-movie days, the business of peddling lies about life was spotty and unorganized. It was carried on by the cheaper magazines, dime novels, the hinterland preachers and whooping politicians.

Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of cliche.