Quotes

I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started.

[His "golden rule" for successful comedy] A pretty girl is better than a plain one / A leg is better than an arm / A bedroom is better than a living room / An arrival is better that a departure / A birth is better than a death / A chase is better than a chat / A dog is better than a landscape / A kitten is better than a dog / A baby is better than a kitten / A kiss is better than a baby / A pratfall is better than anything.

You can't go around the theaters handing out cards saying, "It isn't my fault". You go on to the next one.

The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.

[on Veronica Lake] She's one of the little people, like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Freddie Bartholomew when he started, who take hold of an audience immediately. She's nothing much in real life--a quiet, rather timid little thing. But the screen transforms her, electrifies her and brings her to life.

When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten-cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.

Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly, but without pity, that which yesterday was young. Alone our memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the passing years.

[when asked by a writer to compose his own epitaph] Now I've laid me down to die / I pray my neighbors not to pry / too deeply into sins that I / not only cannot here deny / but much enjoyed as time flew by.