Film directors from New York City

170 quotes found

"Lady, it rose below vulgarity."

- Mel Brooks

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"Who's the dummy writing this show?!"

- Mel Brooks

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"I was in the middle of shooting the last few weeks of Blazing Saddles somewhere in the Antelope Valley, and Gene Wilder and I were having a cup of coffee and he said, I have this idea that there could be another "Frankenstein." I said not another — we've had the son of, the cousin of, the brother-in-law, we don't need another Frankenstein. His idea was very simple: What if the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein wanted nothing to do with the family whatsoever. He was ashamed of those wackos. I said, "That's funny.""

- Mel Brooks

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"Comedy is a weird but very beautiful thing. Even though it seems foolish and silly and crazy, comedy has the most to say about the human condition. Because if you can laugh, you can get by. You can survive when things are bad when you have a sense of humor."

- Mel Brooks

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"As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes."

- Mel Brooks

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"If they [presidents] can't do it to their wives, they do it to their country."

- Mel Brooks

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"To me, tragedy is if I'll cut my finger, that's tragedy...Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die."

- Mel Brooks

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"[explaining that Paul Revere was Anti-Semitic] He was scared they were moving into the neighborhood. "They're coming, they're coming. The Yiddish, they're coming""

- Mel Brooks

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"After I eat asparagus..."

- Mel Brooks

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"You know Cuneiform? You know Sanskrit? It's neither of those."

- Mel Brooks

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"Angel of Death ain't kissing me! I'm full of garlic!"

- Mel Brooks

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"It's Wheird, there's an H in there. Gotta hit that H otherwise they think I'm some sort of a kook!"

- Mel Brooks

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"[on ancient poetry] Nog Nog! Mkellen bebog! V'luch Matuch Maluch M'tog!"

- Mel Brooks

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"[on the greatest invention] Liquid Prell."

- Mel Brooks

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"No! You don't wear a hat on your gentles! You wear a hat on your head where you're supposed to wear a hat!"

- Mel Brooks

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"[On Churchill's Accent] "Ve must conquer da Narjies!" Now, we were fighting and killing Nazis. We all left and went looking for Narjies!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Max Bialystock: That's it, baby, when you've got it, flaunt it, flaunt it!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Max Bialystock: I'm wearing a cardboard belt!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Stormtrooper Mel : Don't be stupid, be a smarty Come and join the Nazi Party!"

- Mel Brooks

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"LSD as Adolf Hitler: Heil Baby!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Lead Tenor Stormtrooper: Springtime, for Hitler, and Germany Winter, for Poland and France!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Max Bialystock: How could this happen? I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?"

- Mel Brooks

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"Leo Bloom: Actors are not animals! They're human beings! Max Bialystock: They are? Have you ever eaten with one?"

- Mel Brooks

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"Hope for the best. Expect the worst. The world's a stage. We're unrehearsed. No way of knowing which way it's going. Take your chances, there are no answers. Hope for the best. Expect the worst."

- Mel Brooks

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"Jim "The Waco Kid": My name is Jim, but most people call me...Jim."

- Mel Brooks

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"Sheriff Bart: Good mornin', ma'am! And isn't it a lovely mornin'? Old Woman: Up yours, nigger! Jim "The Waco Kid": [consoling Bart afterwards]: What did you expect? "Welcome, sonny"? "Make yourself at home"? "Marry my daughter"? You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers … these are people of the land … the common clay of the New West. You know – morons."

- Mel Brooks

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"Sheriff Bart: Excuse me while I whip this out."

- Mel Brooks

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"Sheriff Bart: Where the white women at?"

- Mel Brooks

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"Railway Worker: You shifty nigger! They said you was hung! Sheriff Bart : And they was right!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Sheriff Bart [waking up a drunk Jim in jail]: Are we awake? Jim "The Waco Kid": We're not sure. Are we...black? Sheriff Bart: Yes, we are. Jim "The Waco Kid": Then we're awake, but we're very puzzled."

- Mel Brooks

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"Sheriff Bart: Since I am your host and you are my guest what are your hobbies? What do you like to do in your free time? Jim "The Waco Kid": Oh you know, play chess...screw. Sheriff Bart: (Quickly) Let's play chess!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Igor: My grandfather used to work for your grandfather. Of course the rates have gone up."

- Mel Brooks

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"Igor (limping off): Walk this way — and Dr. Frankenstein limps off after him."

- Mel Brooks

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"Dr. Frankenstein:: Igor, would you give me a hand with the bags? Igor:: [doing a Groucho Marx] Certainly, you take the blonde and I'll take the one in the turban."

- Mel Brooks

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"Igor:: Sed-a... Inga:: Sed-a... Igor:: Dirty word! He said a dirty word!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Dr. Frankenstein Damn your eyes! Igor (pointing at his lazy eye) Too late!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Josephus: I'm Josephus, and I'm the main course over at the Colosseum!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Count de Monet: [consistently mispronounced as "count da money"] Bearnaise? Bernaise: Yes? Count de Monet: Do we have any of those delicious raisins left? Bearnaise: You ate yours. These are mine. Count de Monet: Au contraire, they are mine! I paid for them! Hand them over! Bearnaise: [gives the bag of raisins to the Count, sotto voce, mimicking] 'Au contraire, I paid for them! They're mine!' [blows a raspberry] Count de Monet: Don't be saucy with me, Bearnaise! Bernaise: [mouths] Bitch."

- Mel Brooks

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"Count de Monet: It is said that the people are revolting King Louis XVI: You said it. They stink on ice."

- Mel Brooks

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"Impoverished Paris Street Merchant (Jack Carter): Rats, rats for sale. Get your rats. Good for rat stew, rat soup, or the ever-popular ratatouille."

- Mel Brooks

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"Other Street Merchant: Nothing, I have absolutely nothing for sale!"

- Mel Brooks

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"King Louis XVI: [prior to his arrest] It's good to be the king. [also used in Robin Hood- Men In Tights and The Producers [Musical]]"

- Mel Brooks

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"Tomás de Torquemada: It's better to lose your skullcap than your skull."

- Mel Brooks

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"Moses: Lord, I shall give these laws unto thy people. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?! All pay heed! The Lord! The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen- [drops one of the tablets] Oy. Ten! Ten commandments! For all to obey!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Madame Defarge: And now, let us end this meeting on a high note. [proceeds to sing a sharp high note, followed by the rest of the revolutionaries]"

- Mel Brooks

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"Jail Inmates: Eighty fff...Eighty fff...Eighty fff...Eighty fff...Eighty Six!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Excuse me, is this England?"

- Mel Brooks

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"Dark Helmet: I see your schwartz is as big as mine."

- Mel Brooks

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"Radar Officer: I've lost the sweeps, the bleeps, and the creeps! [Explains via vocal sound effects] Dark Helmet [aside to Colonel Sandurz]: That's not all he's lost."

- Mel Brooks

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"Dark Helmet : What? You went over my helmet?"

- Mel Brooks

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"President Skroob: What the hell, it works on Star Trek!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Dark Helmet: What's the matter Colonel Sandurz... chicken?!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Dark Helmet [after everyone on the bridge announces that their last name is "Asshole."]: I knew it, I'm surrounded by Assholes."

- Mel Brooks

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"Lonestar: That's all we needed, a Druish Princess!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Dark Helmet : So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."

- Mel Brooks

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"Ahchoo:Man, white men can't jump!!"

- Mel Brooks

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"King Richard: From this day forward, all toilets in this kingdom shall be known as...'Johns'!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Little John: Let's face it — you've got to be a man to wear tights!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Man In Front of Castle: Hey Abbot!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Townspeople: A black sheriff? Blinkin: He's Black?! Ahchoo: Why not? It worked in Blazing Saddles."

- Mel Brooks

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"Robin Hood: Watch my back! Achoo: Yo' back just got punched twice."

- Mel Brooks

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"Will Scarlet Blinkin, fix your boobs, you look like a bleeding Picasso."

- Mel Brooks

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"Blinkin Aaahhhh, you lost your arms in battle, but you grew some nice boobs (Blinkin gropes the Venus De Milo statue left behind after creditors take away Loxley Castle)"

- Mel Brooks

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"Robin Hood: Because unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with a English accent."

- Mel Brooks

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"Sheriff of Rotingham King illegal forest to pig wild kill in it a is!"

- Mel Brooks

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"Spiegel: Can you also get your revenge on him by using comedy?"

- Mel Brooks

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"He understands not only with his brain but with his heart. And that might be called love. Not quite sure, but maybe that's the key."

- Mel Brooks

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"Mel Brooks has all the consistency of Spike Milligan, the subtle self-censorship of Benny Hill, and the human warmth of Bob Monkhouse. It's a good job he has the brassneck and occasional brainstorms of Mel Brooks or he would be a monster."

- Mel Brooks

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"Mel is sensual with me. He treats me like an uncle — a dirty uncle. He's an earthy man and very moral underneath. He has traditional values."

- Mel Brooks

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"All the apprehensions that surface in Brooks's comedy have the same eventual source: a fear — or, to put it more positively, a hatred — of death."

- Mel Brooks

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"I like how if you criticize the war you don't support the troops. You're the ones sending them over to die, so how is it I don’t support them? If the army was made up of child molesters, then I'd support them. If we went to an all child molester army, I would be their biggest supporter. "Please don't bring the troops home. Stay the course. Keep them there a long time." But they're not child molesters. And they're not the Twins, that’s for sure. Where are the Twins? Send in the Twins. I'd like to hear that scene. "Jenna, Barbara... Daddy and I have talked it over and we want you to go fight in Iraq." …Ah, what's the use?"

- Larry David

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"If every student was like me in college, we'd still be in Vietnam."

- Larry David

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"One thing about Hitler that I admire is that he wouldn't take any shit from magicians." (Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO special)"

- Larry David

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"Let me tell you something; I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish. (When accused of being a self-loathing Jew; Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 2, Episode 3, "Trick or Treat")"

- Larry David

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"(on not going to his high school prom) I wasn't aware of the prom. I had no idea that it was even going on, not that I would have gone. It's not the kind of thing that would ever occur to me. You would think I would have heard about it in school, but I didn't. (Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book)"

- Larry David

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"Pretty...pretty...pretty......pretty.....pretty good. (Curb Your Enthusiasm, passim)"

- Larry David

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"This is a sad day for the Emmy's. It is, however, a good day for Larry David. I imagine the wife will be forthcoming tonight. (Accepting an Emmy Award)"

- Larry David

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"(Asked if he believes in miracles) I believe that every erection is a miracle. (Curb Season 7, Episode 6 "The Bare Midriff")."

- Larry David

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"I tolerate lactose like I tolerate people."

- Larry David

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"I have to let him know that he's potentially destroying his movie, that he could be making a terrible, terrible error. I needed to let him know that I didn't know or think that I was capable of doing this."

- Larry David

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"I've had some experience in this arena. So it wasn't foreign to me to have a woman say she doesn't want to see me anymore."

- Larry David

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"Listen, this is crazy. I look like I'm 75 years old. Nobody wants to watch an old man being funny. That's just a fact. No one wants to see this old man on TV."

- Larry David

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"A lot of sexual harassment stuff in the news, and I couldn't help but notice a very disturbing pattern emerging, which is that many of the predators, not all, but many of them are Jews"

- Larry David

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"I even found myself doing a routine on Saturday Night Live with my impersonator Larry David, who did Bernie Sanders better than I did."

- Larry David

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"Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It's terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. The fantasy of rape — of which mine is in a kind of prepubescent sub-category — is common enough among women and (in mirror image) among men."

- Nora Ephron

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"I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive."

- Nora Ephron

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"Insane people are always sure they're just fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy."

- Nora Ephron

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"Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride's disease."

- Nora Ephron

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"It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are entering a third era, in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work."

- Nora Ephron

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"[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!"

- Nora Ephron

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"I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. ... Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they're going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, "Why am I out there looking for directors?" — because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, "I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier.""

- Nora Ephron

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"The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news — did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it? — has a kind of fun appeal."

- Nora Ephron

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"I was so tired of seeing these stupid, cheerful books about ageing. One of them even has this whole thing in it about how you are going to have the greatest sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. Which is just garbage.I thought about it and realised that there was one circumstance that you could have the best sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. That would be if you had never had sex until you were 60 or 70."

- Nora Ephron

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"Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist."

- Nora Ephron

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"Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four."

- Nora Ephron

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"With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie."

- Nora Ephron

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"In order for it to be good, it had to be honest on both sides [to both sexes]. Nora taught me how she sees men and how she sees me and that's what I got from her more than anything, aside from the fact that she's so funny."

- Nora Ephron

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"Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey."

- J. J. Abrams

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"The experience I had seeing Star Wars for the first time was mind-blowing. Eleven is a great age to have your mind blown. I will never forget that feeling of seeing "Long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away" fade out. It was the first time a movie made me believe in another world that way."

- J. J. Abrams

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"It was nothing that I think any one of us took on because it was a gig that was available. It was something that felt like a true passion and something that every single person brought much more than any of us could have expected. … I do honestly feel honored to be part of this group."

- J. J. Abrams

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"I’ve always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane. … The most exciting thing for me is crossing that bridge between something we know is real and something that is extraordinary. The thing for me has always been how you cross that bridge."

- J. J. Abrams

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"Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) is probably the most influential film of my generation. … That movie was the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns did to our parents' generations, it left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films."

- J. J. Abrams

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"When I was a kid and saw Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope for the first time, it blew my mind and around the same time, I had friends who were huge fans of Star Trek and I don’t know if I was smart enough to get it, or patient enough. What I loved about Star Wars was the visceral energy of it, the clarity of it, the kind of innocence and big heart of it. Star Trek always felt a little bit more sophisticated and philosophical, debating moral dilemmas and things that were theoretically interesting, but for some reason I couldn’t get on board. It really took working with all these guys and actually working on Star Trek for me to fall in love with that."

- J. J. Abrams

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"We went from the silent era to the sound era, and now we’ve done it again. Now that we’re digital, I assume we will stay digital for at least 50 years. Everybody says, "Oh, you’re going to replace actors." You can’t replace actors. We’ve created duplicates, clones, but they can’t act. They’re a computer, for God’s sake. If you think back to what was done in the Star Wars films, it unbridled people’s imaginations. That of course fueled the business at ILM because they were being approached more and more to keep raising the bar. Actors will not be replaced: worst case scenario, they’ll have to wear a lycra leotard!"

- J. J. Abrams

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"My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it."

- Saul Bass

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"Design is thinking made visible."

- Saul Bass

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"There is nothing glamorous in what I do. I'm a working man. Perhaps I'm luckier than most in that I receive considerable satisfaction from doing useful work which I, and sometimes others, think is good."

- Saul Bass

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"Symbolize and summarize."

- Saul Bass

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"Whenever I quit porn, I'll be starting at square one again—I am going to be where all my friends were ten years ago. I don't know if I want to have kids, so that is a huge issue right now in my mind, too..."

- Asa Akira

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"I don’t like anything that makes fun of Asian culture or makes it look dumb. It’s such a thin line to walk and everyone draws that line someplace different. It’s such a subjective thing."

- Asa Akira

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"One would think that making a film is an ; you're building this—it's not, it's . The best metaphor I know of is we make in [] and it takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And that's what the process is."

- Ken Burns

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"I think this is the greatest threat to our republic ever. Not the Depression, not World War II, not the Civil War. This is it … This moment of all these intersecting viruses, of novel coronaviruses and of racial injustice — [a] 402-year-old-virus. And it’s an age-old human virus of lying and misinformation and paranoia and conspiracy. This is the pill that will kill us unless we do something."

- Ken Burns

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"Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined."

- Ken Burns

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"I tried to have a child. Along the way, my body broke. My relationship did, too. In the process—because of it?"

- Lena Dunham

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"Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds."

- Lena Dunham

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"Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just "relax on me.""

- Lena Dunham

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"Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying."

- Lena Dunham

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"Her stickly, muscly little body thrashes beside me every night .. even as I slipped my hand into my underwear .. I always pretended to hate it."

- Lena Dunham

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"Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn't resist"

- Lena Dunham

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"It was Grandma Dorothy who taught me critical theory, who steeped me in the tradition of Afrocentric aesthetic regulations, who trained me to understand that a story should be informed by the emancipatory impulse that characterizes our storytelling trade in these territories as exemplified by those freedom narratives which we've been trained to call slave narratives for reasons too obscene to mention, as if the "slave" were an identity and not a status interrupted by the very act of fleeing, speaking, writing, and countering the happy-darky propaganda. She taught that a story should contain mimetic devices so that the tale is memorable, shareable, that a story should be grounded in cultural specificity and shaped by the modes of Black art practice-call-and-response but one modality that bespeaks a communal ethos. I would later read Fanon on the subject-"To speak is to assume a culture and to bear responsibility for a civilization." Later still, I read Paolo Freire, speaking on activist pedagogy, engaged cultural work. "The purpose of educational forms is to reflect and encourage the practice of freedom.""

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"But in the storytelling arenas, from kitchen tales to outdoor university anecdotes, "women's morality" was much more expansive, interesting, it took on the heroic-Harriet T. and Ida B. and the women who worked with W. E. B. Du Bois, the second wife of Booker T. and the Mother Divine of the Peace and Co-op Movement, and Claudia Jones, organizer from Trinidad who was deported during the Crackdown, when the national line shifted from "blacks as inferior" to "blacks as subversive" and wound up in a stone quarry prison and wrote "In every bit as hard as they hit me." These women were characterized as "morally exemplary," meaning courageous, disciplined, skilled and brilliant, responsive to responsibility for and accountable to the community. The other type of memorable tale bound up in these women heroics was tales of resistance-old and contemporary-insurrections, flight, abolition, warfare in alliance with Seminoles and Narragansetts during the period of European enslavement; the critical roles men and women played in the revolutionary overthrow of slavery; and in the Reconstruction self-help enterprises founded, the self-governing townships founded, the political convention convened and progressive legislation pressed through; and in days since the mobilization, organization, agitation, legislation, economic boycotts, protest demonstrations, rent strikes, parades, consumer-cooperative organizations."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Grandma Dorothy, in an effort to encourage our minds to leap, would tell us, "Of course we know how to walk on the water, of course we know how to fly; fear of sinking, though, sometimes keeps us from the first crucial move, then too, the terrible educations you liable to get is designed to make you destruct the journey entire. So send your minds on home to the motherland and just tell the tale, you little honeys." And my mama-not one to traffic in metaphors usually, being a very scientific woman-would add, "Yeah, speak your speak, 'cause every silence you maintain is liable to become first a lump in your throat, then a lump in your lymphatic system.""

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Winter 1979. We are now in the fourth year of the last quarter of the twentieth century. And the questions that face the millions of us on the earth are-in whose name will the twenty-first century be claimed? Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? Where are the evolved, poised-for-light adepts who will assume the task of administering power in a human interest, of redefining power as being not the privilege or class right to define, deform, and dominate but as the human responsibility to define, transform, and develop?"

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Writing is one of the ways I participate in struggle-one of the ways I help to keep vibrant and resilient that vision that has kept the Family going on. Through writing I attempt to celebrate the tradition of resistance, attempt to tap Black potential, and try to join the chorus of voices that argues that exploitation and misery are neither inevitable nor necessary. Writing is one of the ways I participate in the transformation-one of the ways I practice the commitment to explore bodies of knowledge for the usable wisdoms they yield. In writing, I hope to encourage the fusion of those disciplines whose split (material science versus metaphysics versus aesthetics versus politics versus...) predisposes us to accept fragmented truths and distortions as the whole. Writing is one of the ways I do my work in the world. There are no career labels for that work, no facile terms to describe the tasks of it. Suffice to say that I do not take lightly the fact that I am on the earth at this particular time in human history, and am here as a member of a particular soul group and of a particular sex, having this particular adventure as a Pan-Africanist-socialist-feminist in the United States. I figure all that means something about what I'm here to understand and to do."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"I'm interested in usable truths. Which means rising above my training, thinking better than I've been taught, developing a listening habit, making the self available to intelligence, engaging in demystification, and seeking out teachers at every turn. In many respects the writings are notebooks I'm submitting to those teachers for examination."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"When I look back on the body of book reviews I've produced in the past fifteen years, for all their socioideolitero brilliant somethinorother, the underlying standard always seemed to be-Does this author here genuinely love his/her community?"

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"The greatest challenge in writing, then, in the earlier stages was to strike a balance between candor, honesty, integrity, and truth-terms that are fairly synonomous for crossword puzzlers and thesaurus ramblers but hard to equate as living actions."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Certain kinds of poisons, for example-rage, bitterness, revenge-don't need to be in the atmosphere, not to mention in my mouth."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"I don't, for example, conjure up characters for the express purpose of despising them, of breaking their humps in public. I used to be astounded at Henry James et al., so nice nasty about it too, soooo refined. Gothic is of no interest to me. I try not to lend energy to building grotesqueries, depicting morbid relationships, dramatizing perversity."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"If I'm not laughing while I work, I conclude that I am not communicating nourishment, since laughter is the most sure-fire healant I know. I don't know all my readers, but I know well for whom I write. And I want for them no less than I want for myself-wholesomeness. It all sounds so la-di-da and tra-la-la. I can afford to be sunny. I'm but one voice in the chorus. The literature(s) of our time are a collective effort, dependent on so many views, on so many people's productions."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"There aren't even phrases in the languages for half the things happening just on the block where I live, not yet anyhow."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"I read everybody I can get to, and I appreciate the way "American literature" is being redefined now that the Black community is dialoguing without defensive postures, now that the Puerto Rican writers are coming through loud and clear, and the Chicano and Chicana writers, and Native American and Asian-American."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"For my own writing, I prefer the upbeat."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Muhammad Ali, in his autobiography, I Am the Greatest, defines a champion as one who takes the telling blow on the chin and hits the canvas hard, can't possibly rally, arms shot, energy spent, the very weight of the body too heavy a burden for the legs to raise, can't possibly get up. So you do. And you keep getting up. The Awakening by Kate Chopin is not my classic. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is. Sylvia Plath and the other obligatory writers on women's studies list-the writers who hawk despair, insanity, alienation, suicide, all in the name of protesting woman's oppression, are not my mentors. I was rasied on stories of Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Paul Robeson, and my grandmother, Annie, whom folks in Atlanta still remember as an early Rosa Parks."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"The short story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life. When I replay the tapes on file in my head, tapes of speeches I've given at writing conferences over the years, I invariably hear myself saying "A writer, like any other cultural worker, like any other member of the community, ought to try to put her/his skills in the service of the community.""

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Since the breakthrough achieved in the sixties by the Neo-Black Arts Movement, the possibilities are stunning. Characters that have been waiting in the wings for generations, characters that did not fit into the roster of stereotypes, can now be brought down center stage."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"I'm attempting to blueprint for myself the merger of these two camps: the political and the spiritual. The possibilities of healing that split are exciting. The implications of actually yoking those energies and of fusing that power quite take my breath away."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"She would not break her discipline to comfort herself in a shallow way. Would no more break discipline with her Self than she would her covenant with God."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Then the silence. A whole generation silent"

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Then M’Dear Sophie always said, “Find meaning where you’re put, Vee.” So she exhaled deeply and tried to relax and stick it out and pay attention.”"

- Toni Cade Bambara

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""I’m available to any and every adventure of the human breath.”"

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Silence. Stillness. To give her soul a chance to attend its own affairs at its own level."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"“Keep the focus on the action not the institution; don’t confuse the vehicle with the objective; all cocoons are temporary and disappear”"

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"There have been a lot of things in ... the Black experience for which there are no terms, certainly not in English at this moment. There are a lot of aspects of consciousness for which there is no vocabulary, no structure in the English language which would allow people to validate that experience through language. I'm trying to find a way to do that....I'm trying to break open and get at the bones, deal with symbols as though they were atoms. I'm trying to find out not only how a word gains meaning, but how a word gains power.""

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"I think Toni Cade Bambara is an amazing writer. I love Bambara’s work because there is a certain fineness of feeling in her voice. She has a loving sympathetic imagination as well as a great deal of negative capability. There are also currents of redemptive love and joy that run through her work. And she makes me laugh, really, really laugh."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"I read the same five people over and over again. But it’s Toni Morrison; Toni Cade Bambara is a huge influence...If you want to talk about studying how somebody can use voice, her fiction is absolutely astonishing in that way. But she was also a genius in sort of a million ways. She was a cultural essayist and very clear about how she understood herself and her work in the world. A hugely influential work for me is her essay, “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” where she talks about, what is the work of a writer? What is the work of what I write? And what are the traditions that I’m going to actively be pulling from? She was really clear—again, sort of like Morrison, they were very close friends—she was really clear about when she was writing about Black women, that she was not writing into the tradition of white feminist literature. She name-checked “The Yellow Wallpaper” and just was like, I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in talking about characters who are, in her opinion, wallowing in this thing. These characters are going to be actively engaged with the world around them in a very specific way. And that’s the tradition that I’m writing into because that’s the cultural tradition that I understand and see around me in the people around me."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"As the writer Toni Cade Bambara once put it, the role of the artist is to "make revolution irresistible." Make no mistake about it: overthrowing the fossil-fuel industry is nothing short of a revolution, a rebirth."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"When contemporary feminist movement first began, feminist writings and scholarship by black women was groundbreaking. The writings of black women like Cellestine Ware, Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis, to name a few, were all works that sought to articulate, define, speak to and against the glaring omissions in feminist work, the erasure of black female presence."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"She made revolution irresistible"

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"In a uniquely distinct way, Audre Lorde's and Toni Cade Bambara's presence in Bridge also impacted Bridge's success. Audre and Toni were exemplary sister-writers, emblematic of that great surge of Black feminist writing spilling into our hands in 1970s and 80s. As "sisters of the yam"... they stood up in unwavering solidarity with the rest of us "sisters of the rice, sisters of the corn, sisters of the plantain" and that mattered. It helped put Bridge, coedited by two "unknown" Chicana writers, on the political-literary map. All in all, it was a brave moment in feminist history."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"The writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara, who first introduced This Bridge Called My Back twenty years ago, countered institutionalized amnesia in her own dangerous writings before her untimely death from cancer in 1995. She wrote in her novel Those Bones Are Not My Child: "Maybe you are a crazy woman, but you'd rather embrace madness than amnesia." In this statement resides our shared resistance mission as women-of-color writers and activists living inside the numbing forgetfulness of an "occupied América." Our task is to remember...Toni Cade Bambara believed that we women of color have not forgotten, not in that cave of memory where the freest part of us resides, the basic elements of our lives: the mother-ground that brings sweet sustenance to the world's children; the mother-ground in which we finally lay down our bones and brain to rest. A women-of-color movement is a movement in the act of remembering earth."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"In her novel The Salt Eaters, published in the year before This Bridge Called My Back, Toni Cade Bambara proffered this question to women of color: "Can you afford to be whole?" It is a question to ask myself, it is a question to ask my country."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"my "sisters of the corn," as Toni Cade Bambara called Native women."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"I don't know if she knew the heart cling of her fiction. Its pedagogy, its use, she knew very well, but I have often wondered if she knew how brilliant at it she was. There was no division in her mind between optimism and ruthless vigilance; between aesthetic obligation and the aesthetics of obligation. There was no doubt whatsoever that the work she did had work to do. She always knew what her work was for. Any hint that art was over there and politics was over here would break her up into tears of laughter, or elicit a look so withering it made silence the only intelligent response. More often she met the art/politics fake debate with a slight wave-away of the fingers on her beautiful hand, like the dismissal of a mindless, desperate fly who had maybe two little hours of life left...Of course she knew...Perhaps my wondering whether or not she realized how original, how rare her writing is is prompted by the fact that I knew it was not her only love. She had another one. Stronger. As the Essays and Conversations portion of this collection testifies, (especially after the completion of her magnum opus about the child murders in Atlanta) she came to prefer film: writing scripts, making film, critiquing, teaching, analyzing it and enabling others to do the same. The Bombing of Osage Avenue and W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices contain sterling examples of her uncompromising gifts and her determination to help rescue a genre from its powerful social irrelevancy. In fiction, in essays, in conversation one hears the purposeful quiet of this ever vocal woman; feels the tenderness in this tough Harlem/Brooklyn girl; joins the playfulness of this profoundly serious writer. When turns of events wearied the gallant and depleted the strong, Toni Cade Bambara, her prodigious talent firmly in hand, stayed the distance."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"I read writers like Toni Cade Bambera and Toni Morrison because they write fiction that is not boring or alienating to me but moving"

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"I look everywhere for signs of that fusion I have glimpsed in the women's movement, and most recently in Nicaragua. I turn to Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters or Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy or James Baldwin's Just above My Head...This kind of art-like the art of so many others uncanonized in the dominant culture-is not produced as a commodity, but as part of a long conversation with the elders and with the future. Such artists draw on a tradition in which political struggle and spiritual continuity are meshed. Nothing need be lost, no beauty sacrificed. The heart does not turn to a stone."

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"the purpose of a writer, as Toni Cade Bambara said, "is to make revolution irresistible""

- Toni Cade Bambara

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"Despite everything that's happening, art is still here, It's still alive, but in a way that accommodates what we're facing."

- Max Hechtman

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"It’s your imagination that becomes your superpower. Use it to come up with new ways and ideas to create work that could resonate with others."

- Max Hechtman

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"I hope to take what I see and introduce it to a wider audience, hearing songs that relate to a story with true messages and themes and even learn about the past so no one makes the same mistake again."

- Max Hechtman

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"It [filmmaking] makes me feel like I'm able to bring stories to life, so it feels like you're there, It gives perspectives they've never seen before."

- Max Hechtman

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"When casting, I look for actors who not only can bring the characters to life, but also add a sense of realism to their performance — I want the raw emotion to feel authentic. Think of it as if we are watching real people react to the world around them."

- Max Hechtman

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"Art has the power to heal and inspire, and I want my films to ultimately lead to positive outcomes and a greater sense of understanding. This matters to me because through most of my life, I’ve faced many obstacles and challenges, and filmmaking is my way of connecting with others and showing them they aren’t alone. As I continue to learn and expand upon my craft, my goal is to fulfill this mission in every project and inspire other emerging filmmakers to do the same."

- Max Hechtman

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"I want to go deep beneath the surface of a subject, visually depict its core meaning, and express that understanding through a cinematic combination of intentional visuals, music, editing, and captivating performances."

- Max Hechtman

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"It’s all about revealing a deeper truth and not just showing events as they would normally happen."

- Max Hechtman

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"We try to encourage students to run with whatever they're passionate about. Sometimes it's a more personal film, sometimes it's a personal narrative. With Max, it's a topic that he felt was really important to him and he’s seen in other media and really wanted to explore in this format."