Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.

There is a need for heroism in American life today.

The seat of the greatest patriotic loyalties is in the stomach. Long after giving up all attachment to the land of his birth, the naturalized American citizen holds fast to the food of his parents.

In the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.

It was the woman who first began to grope for the mysteries of the other's soul. She took his head in her hands and held it as though it were a large and heavy fruit, gathered in the sun.

I was growing tired of all the fussing and prevaricating, of the stolen hours and the secret rendez-vous; of the small indignities and broad discomfort that are part and parcel of adultery.

A man with money to pay for a meal can talk about hunger without demeaning himself. ... But for a man with no money hunger is a disgrace.

Pity is the deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman.

To me, writing is not a profession. You might as well call living a profession. Or having children. Anything you can't help doing.

People don't speak of hunger when they know what it is to be hungry.

Cats will be clean in a pigsty while pigs will be dirty in a marble hall.

He who does not move with the times is a dead man.

You don't get ulcers from what you eat. You get them from what's eating you.

The most remarkable thing about Hollywood is that it does not exist. ... Hollywood, in a word, has no center, never had one, no city hall, court house, church, square, or rather it probably has some of those but they're so aimlessly thrown in with the general jumble ... that I, for one, never found them.

Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.

Perfection bores me, in art, in music; most of all, in people. Luckily, perfection is rare.

Men don't make different mistakes at different periods of their lives. They make the same mistake over and over again and they pay a bigger and bigger price for it.

Serious difficulties don't vanish by themselves, they are standing around your bed when you open your eyes the next morning.

The lovely thing about real happiness is that it is there all of a sudden, unexpected, weightless as a little summer cloud and just as radiant and intangible.

The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may be unimportant or remarkable individuals. People on the way up or people on the way down the ladder of life. Prosperity and disaster may be separated by no more than the thickness of a wall.