Action is character.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.