- [on alcohol] It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.
- [on belief] At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45 they are caves in which we hide.
- [on age and aging in your 20s] One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.
- [on California and the West] Only remember--west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
- [on despair] In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
- [on free will] The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at 30 has a balanced idea of what will-power and fate have each contributed. The one who gets there at 40 is liable to put the emphasis on will alone.
- Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
- A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
- Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.
- What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.
- No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
- [on Joan Crawford] Why do her lips have to be glistening wet? I don't like her smiling to herself. Her cynical accepting smile has gotten a little tired. She cannot fake her bluff.
- [on Errol Flynn] He seemed very nice, though rather silly and fatuous.
- The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
- [on Colleen Moore] I was the spark that lit up flaming youth. Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.
- There are no second acts in American lives.
- Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the dramatic flapper. The girl you see at the smartest night clubs -- gowned to the apex of sophistication -- toying iced glasses, with a remote, faintly bitter expression -- dancing deliriously -- laughing a great deal with wide, hurt eyes. It takes girls of actual talent to get away with this in real life.
- With a woman, I have to be emotionally in it up to the eyebrows, or it's nothing. With me it isn't an affair-it must be the real thing . . . . Silly, isn't it? Look at all the fun we miss!
- All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.'
- I'd rather have written Conrad's Nostromo than any other novel.
- When I was fifteen I went into the city from school to see Ina Claire in The Quaker Girl and Gertrude Ryan in Little Boy Blue. Confused by my hopeless and melancholy love for both of them, I was unable to choose between them -- so they blurred into one lovely entity, the girl.
- Colleen Moore represents the young collegiate -- the carefree, lovable child who rules bewildered but adoring parents with an iron hand. Who beats her brothers and beaus on the tennis courts, dances like a professional and has infallible methods for getting her own way. All deliriously celluloid -- but why not? The public notoriously prefer glamour to realism. Pictures like Miss Moore's flapper epics present a glamorous dream of youth and gaiety and swift, tapping feet. Youth -- actual youth -- is essentially crude. But the movies idealize it, even as Gershwin idealizes jazz in Rhapsody in Blue.
- Clara Bow is the quintessence of what the term 'flapper' signifies as a definite description. Pretty, impudent, superbly assured, as worldly wise, briefly clad and 'hard-berled' as possible. There were hundreds of them -- her prototypes. Now, completing the circle, there are thousands more -- patterning themselves after her.
- European actresses were the first to disregard personal appearance in emotional episodes. Disarranged hair -- the wrong profile to the camera--were of no account during a scene. Their abandonment to emotion precluded all thought of beauty. Pola Negri brought it to this country. It was adopted by some. But the flappers seem to have been a bit nervous as to the results. It was, perhaps, safer to be cute than character. This little Alice White girl, however, appears to have a flair for this total lack of studied effect. She is the flapper impulsive--child of the moment -- wildly eager for every drop of life. She represents -- not the American flapper -- but the European.
- Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
- Grow up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
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