Quotes

I will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

[on Norma Shearer] A face unclouded by thought.

[on the complaints of critics] If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

[on growth] The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

[on the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s] Wearing or not wearing a bra is terribly unimportant. It's being able to buy that bra yourself - that's important.

[on writers] They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talk about writing or themselves.

[ on hippies] God knows, many of them are fools and most of them will be sellouts, but they're a better generation than we were.

[from a letter to HUAC chairman John Wood in May 1952] To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and dishonourable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.