- Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
- [on Marlon Brando] He loves the light! See how the light shines through him? . . . I shouldn't be partial, but he is my favorite one.
- A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.
- Eli Wallach has discovered the secret of pissing people off. He's happy.
- Why pick on [Elia] Kazan just because he made a mistake sixteen years ago and joined the Communist Party when he didn't know what it was all about? If you keep it up, there won't be anybody out here but those who know how to make B-pictures.
- [on alcoholic episodes in his later years] I was always falling down, and I would always say, 'I'm about to fall down', and almost nobody ever caught me.
- [re his assignment to write screenplay for Lana Turner] I think that it is one of the funniest but most embarrassing things that ever happened to me, that I should be expected to produce a suitable vehicle for this actress. I feel like an obstetrician required to successfully deliver a mastodon from a beaver.
- [on public acknowledgment of his homosexuality] To feel some humiliation and a great deal of sorrow at times is inevitable. But feeling guilty is foolish. I am a deeper and warmer and kinder man for my deviation. More conscious of need in others, and what power I have to express the human heart must be in large part due to this circumstance.
- [on celebrity] Being successful,and famous makes such demands! I wanted it and still want it with one part of me, but that isn't the part of me that is important or creative.
- [April 1947] Nobody sees anybody truly. Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos, the corresponding distortions in the eyes of the others - and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.
- [1983] I've gone from good reviews, to bad reviews, to no reviews.
- [May 1982] I don't understand my life, past or present, nor do I understand life itself. Death seems more comprehensible to me.
- William Saroyan wrote a great play (The Time of Your Life) on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having.
- In Rome, you rarely see a young man on the street who does not have a slight erection.
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