She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you – like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist – or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
Isn’t Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
Debut: the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public.
That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.
If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.
If you are strong enough, there are no precedents.
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.
After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
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.
A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
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.
I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.