The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.

The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power).

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.