“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

“One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.”

“Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”

“Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.”

“At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain - as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.”

“All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.”

“You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.”