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

There's only one law you gotta follow to keep outta trouble. Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doin' it.

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

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

I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.

The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.

In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.

Love is a hole in the heart.

People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.

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.

Listen, little boy. In this business, there's only one law you gotta follow to keep outta trouble. Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doin' it.

Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.

I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.

In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.

I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.

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

I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.

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.

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

A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.

I have lived in other cities but been inside of only one. I once wore all the windows of Chicago and all its doorways on a key ring. Salons, mansions, alleys, courtrooms, depots, factories, hotels, police cells, the lake front, the rooftops and the sidewalks were my haberdashery.

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.

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.

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.

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

There are millions of Americans who belong by nature in movie theaters as they belong at political rallies or in fortuneteller parlors and on the shoot-the-chutes. To these millions, the movies are a sort of boon - a gaudier version of religion.

What better is there to sigh for than happiness, yesterday's or tomorrow's.

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

Time is a circus always packing up and moving away.

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

I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when lifes hidden. It 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.

The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.

By Rice's own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a war president the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one?

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

I have done things politically, and I've been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I've been doing it as a part-time job.

I hate wasting people's time.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

The work that we do during the winter is very important; we have a new bike and it's important to develop it during this time, and we start with this test.

Fortunately, I happened to go east at a time when live television was centered in New York.

I want to spend more time with those kids. I want to dedicate my time to train those kids and teach them what it takes, what they need to do to get to this level.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

Sitting at home the way I do, I'd just love the hear from people. It'd be a great help in passing the time.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

Compared to today's salaries, our cut was minuscule but it was very good for the time.