There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.

Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.

The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.

Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.

Democracy is not perfect. It is an imperfection that the majority choose to support.

Capitalism invariably boils down to barter between two willing parties, neither of whom uses force to work with the other.

alone, adj. In bad company.

I was in Deadwood at the time and on hearing of the killing made my way at once to the scene of the shooting and found that my friend had been killed by McCall.

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.

Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.

Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.

I shall despair when I despair of myself, of God and humanity.

Let us not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?